Artifice
by astrarisks
Summary: <html><head></head>"You'll never be a real part of my family!" she shouted. "...Maybe I won't," was the reply, "but I can sure as hell try." (Anna tries so, very hard to ignore the fact that this — this thing in front of her looks exactly like her sister.) :: elsa/anna, icest. clone!au.</html>
1. promise

_(uploaded — 10.6.14) _:: _[god help me this week i have like two billion tests _D:_ and this was...ridiculously hard to write. k__ind of in a different style than _streetlight walls_, but i hope it's enjoyable all the same.__]_ :: _{playlist: _"back to december"; _taylor swift}_

:.

_I don't own _Frozen_. You can also find this on AO3._

* * *

><p><strong>Artifice<strong>

.

.

_(i)_

_there's a face we hide till the nighttime appears  
><em>_and what's hiding inside  
><em>_behind all our fears  
><em>_is our true self locked inside the façade_

* * *

><p><strong>chapter one<strong> :: promise

-—

**part the first** :: and where will we begin

Anna and Elsa, Elsa and Anna.

They need each other like oxygen.

It's certainly not an exaggeration, and it certainly is a fact.

:.

The first time Anna realizes that there may have been something wrong with Elsa, they're playing tag in the yard and everything's bright and warm and perfect.

Anna is scampering across the green grass, pockmarked with fallen red and orange leaves here and there, chasing after her elder sister as fast as her legs could carry her (which, admittedly, isn't really that fast at all). Said elder sister's teasing laugh is resounding through the air like a pair of silver bells, loud and clear and an absolutely glorious sound to behold.

The redhead huffs in strain, arms pumping by her side in exertion as she dashes after Elsa who, forever the poised little girl, suddenly manages to trip over her own feet and land in a tangled heap of cotton cloth on the ground, still laughing as Anna seizes her chance and comes jumping at the platinum blonde in a flying leap, shoving her hands onto Elsa's back.

"You're _it!"_ she squeals, and Elsa only laughs ever the harder underneath Anna's wriggling form, the sleeves of her shirt whispering over her arms as she holds her hands up to shove Anna off of her.

Anna catches a glimpse of a faint, small bruise speckling its way up the underside of Elsa's arm and tumbles off, staring with wide eyes at the irregularity.

"What's that?" she asks, pointing at the bruise.

Elsa's smile immediately slipped down a notch, her blue eyes widening in surprise as she quickly tugged her shirtsleeves over her arms once more, pulling them to her wrists self-consciously.

"I'm fine...don't worry, Anna," Elsa smiled, wide and bright as sunshine, and she sounded so _sincere_ that Anna couldn't help but believe her.

_"Don't you worry."_

"Okay," Anna agreed happily, before turning around to trip away from Elsa — "But you're still _it!"_

She didn't notice the flicker of darkness dart across Elsa's expression, marring her face for but a second. The heavy shadows seeping into the cracks of her smile, shoulders sagging with an invisible weight. Anna only saw the sincerity in Elsa's features still rounded with baby fat, Anna only saw a smile that could light up the whole country from New York City to San Francisco, Anna only saw her _sister_ and her sister was all that mattered.

Was all that always mattered.

:.

Elsa is declared sick with a fever two days later and is taken to bed.

(She's still there a week later.)

:.

Three more long months slouch by and her condition only deteriorates by the day. She can feel it — this sickness — festering inside her worn body, aches and darkness creeping into every crevice of her soul she's been too tired to patch close. There are too many dark circles underneath her eyes these days, ringing them like sad little smiles. Faint mottled bruises the color of rot and death begin to plaster themselves to the pale skin of her arms and cling there like some ugly parasite, refusing to fade away.

She can feel it, and she can hear a clock ticking over her head.

Counting down the hours, minutes, seconds she has left to live.

:.

The first layer of fluffy white snow drapes itself on the ground on the thirtieth of November and Elsa is watching the flakes fall with something melancholy tucked away in blue eyes.

This is how Anna finds her, the door to her room bursting open and the redhead coming skipping in. She's already armed against the winter weather, floppy pink hat smashed on the top of her messy strawberry blonde locks and mittens yanked over her hands. She's been tussled into a bundle of thick coats, a blue-and-white scarf patterned with snowflakes wrapped snugly around her neck to tie up the entire ensemble.

"Do you want to build a snowman?" comes the immediate request. Anna has her chubby, cotton-enclosed fingers interlaced together in a plea, rocking back from her heels to her tippy-toes while her sister looks on, an expression of amusement breezing over her face before it falls away, just as quickly.

"...Not today, Anna," Elsa murmurs, tearing her eyes away from the hazy swirls of snow whisking through the air outside to gaze at her sister instead. "But...you go for it." She smiles wanly around a halo of blonde curls. "I'll be...watching you."

Anna doesn't look as happy as Elsa wishes she could be, and she offers her little sister one last reassurance:

"I'll be fine, Anna. I _promise."_

(The heap of promises she doesn't know if she'll be able to keep are piling higher and higher by the day.)

Elsa briefly squeezes Anna into a reassuring hug, then lets her go.

Because anything longer, she quietly reasons, would be seen as a gesture of farewell.

_Good-bye, Olaf._

_Good-bye, world._

_Good-bye, Anna._

_Good-bye._

Anna hesitates for a moment or two, then grins toothily back and decides to accept the apparent truth in her sister's words. She rushes out of the room in a storm of delighted shouts and heavy coats flapping in the tailwind.

Because Elsa has never let her down.

(Not yet.)

:.

It wasn't until three hours later and a worried shout from Father that Anna realizes that Elsa is also an excellent liar.

:.

(Of course, she had always known of Elsa's condition — mother and father had never kept _that_ a secret from her, and Anna knows it herself — but she didn't quite know that it was fatal until the pure and untainted truth snapped right in her face, in the form of white stick fingers and a dead sister.)

:.

Elsa is admitted to the hospital two hours later, bedridden, her pale skin turned even paler and bruises pockmarking the length of her arms. Clear plastic tubes snake in and out underneath her skin, attached to an IV drip, attached to her thin lifeline anchoring her to the living world.

She doesn't speak much the following days, if at all, much too tired to really do anything but stare off into the distance, blue eyes cloudy and vague. Open, yet seeing nothing. But she always manages to conjure up a weak grin when Anna comes bouncing into her ward, pigtails flying and limbs akimbo before she sat herself on the chair that had been all but bolted to the floor next to the platinum blonde's bed.

"You're gonna be alright!" Anna cheers every time she visits Elsa, ever the faithful and trusting, while her older sister listens patiently, her smile a shadow of what it used to be. "The doctors are going to cure you from being sick and then you can come home and we can build Olaf again next winter!"

Elsa only laughs quietly, the sound more of a desperate wheeze for oxygen than anything, before she folds Anna's hands into her own chilly ones.

"Yes...we will," she breathes.

She promises.

Promises that are already broken and null before they leave her mouth, each of them stabbing deeper and deeper into her heart. Vessels made of lies, blood made of molten lead.

But she can't stop herself, because Anna deserves to hope. She deserves to believe.

_Elsa_ deserves to believe, but she can't.

Not when she can see Death looming in every corner, built of the pale shadows that stretch across the wall of the ward during twilight. Silently standing sentinel, every moment of every day.

_I can see you._

_I am coming for you._

But Elsa only holds her little sister's chubby little fingers even tighter and makes her promises quietly.

_"We will."_

_"We will."_

_"We will."_

:.

Death's form grows ever the more solid as the night wears on.

-—

**part the second** :: you'll be alright

Two weeks later at one in the morning, Elsa opens a pair of half-lidded eyes to her mother's tear-stricken gaze.

Her father and Anna are noticeably absent.

"...Mama?" she rasps, instinctively reaching up with her arms, turned thin and defined as brittle sticks.

"Oh — _Elsa_ —"

Elsa's labored breathing bleeds shallow and superficial huffs of air into the fabric of her mother's dress shirt as she instinctively opens her arms to accept her mother's embrace, and she thinks she can feel the tears seeping through the shadowed cracks between their interlocked arms.

"Wh...what's the prognosis?" Elsa whispers.

As if she didn't know already. As if she needed the doctors to make it official. As if the Reaper hadn't been trailing behind on her whispering steps of wind for a month and a half, his black cloak whipping around her with promises of death — drawing ever nearer with every passing second. Shattering her desperate promises with his scythe, slashing through her dreams as if they were made of mist.

And she's just so _tired._

Her mother only sobs harder. "Elsa — please don't —"

"Mama...please...just say it...," and her voice is not that of an ten-year-old girl's, but an old woman at eighty. A voice, frail and worn with weariness, finality, acceptance.

It feels like eternity, a passage of time that outlasts the age of the earth, when her mother finally murmurs into white-blonde hair, "It's fatal."

Elsa only nods serenely, her blue eyes calm and clear. Bony stick fingers closing around her mother's in a squeeze, with all the strength she could muster.

She would probably be crying too, by this point.

(If only she had the energy to do so.)

:.

When mother and father had woken and subsequently trundled Anna into the car at five thirty in the morning to take her to the hospital, they hadn't explained anything. She squinted at them through sleep-blurred eyes and remembered thinking that something was not _quite_ right about her parents' stiff expressions, but she was so _tired_ and she wanted to _sleep._ So she demanded of them a sleep-deprived seven-year-old's explanation: _It's so early! Why did you wake me up?!_

Her parents simply told her that they needed to go to the hospital.

Needless to say, Anna didn't respond well to that; then they told her they needed to see Elsa, and _that_ snapped her eyes open, bright and alert, and she let her mother drape a cotton jacket over her shoulders without further comment.

By the time the garage door closes, the sky is already bleeding vermillion and peach into the sky when they pulled out of the driveway, speckled wisps of purple clouds dashing across the heavens. There blows a quiet, early morning breeze and Anna sticks her left hand out the window to greet the rattling gale, chattering happily away — not quite completely understanding the gravitas that the situation called for. Her parents force out short, broken laughs and make stilted conversation with their youngest daughter, but as they approach ever closer to the hospital, they fall silent, and nothing Anna does can puncture the suddenly stifling atmosphere within the small automobile.

So they make the rest of the ride in suffocating silence, the sound of slamming car doors and clicking locks and a soft _whirr_ of the automatic glass sliding doors leading into the hospital filtering into Anna's ears.

They tell her to go in alone — _"why don't you go and talk to your sister for a few minutes by yourself, alright?" _— while they headed over to the doctors' offices. Anna happily bounds into Elsa's cubicle, greeting the lump on the bed as energetically as she has always done.

But Elsa barely even moves at the sound strawberry blonde's tinkling voice this time, the faintest rustle of sterilized white cotton the only indication she has even noticed Anna coming in at all.

Anna's smile drops down by a full notch as she registers Elsa's less than enthusiastic response, but nevertheless she scampers over to the chair waiting by the edge of Elsa's bed, immediately taking the proffered hand dangling off the edge of the white mattress.

She notices with a start that Elsa herself has deteriorated since the last time she visited, only two days ago — now so skinny and pale that if not for the multicolored bruises interlacing a deadly mosaic of patterns up her arms, Anna doesn't think she would be able to immediately distinguish her sister from the bed.

"Elsa?" she asks again, the enthusiasm clearly draining out of her voice as quickly as rain spills down a gutter.

A crack of brilliant blue appears amidst all the sterile white. Sick as she may have been, Elsa's eyes never completely lost their spark: they were certainly duller, but still just as beautiful as Anna had ever seen them.

"...Anna," comes the quiet acknowledgment, and the redhead ignores the ragged hoarseness that had leeched into her sister's voice. Ignores the wavering quality of it, ignores the fact that Elsa is so very clearly _dying,_ because she still hangs onto whatever strands of hope there are. Still believes, somehow, against all odds, that her sister will make it out of her sickness alive.

"Are you okay?" Anna immediately fires off, and Elsa can't help but weakly chuckle at the _redundancy_ of the question, because she's clearly not "okay," and she may never be again.

"I'll scrape by," she smiles, and inclines her head the tiniest bit to the right. "How...are you doing?"

"Tired," Anna grumbles, interlocking her arms on the edge of Elsa's bed to form her own pillow. The platinum blonde wheezes out another laugh at her little sister's antics.

"I am, too," she agrees placidly, and puts her hand next to Anna's.

"...Ah, hey," Elsa speaks again after a long pause. "Did I ever teach you the secrets of winning a snowball fight?"

Anna blinks up at her. "No. How d'you do that?"

"Don't fight it," Elsa says simply. "You have to surrender before it begins...otherwise, you may get hurt."

Anna doesn't see how this would help her win such a snowball fight — didn't surrendering mean giving up?

(And maybe it's her overactive imagination, but she thinks that the wisps of morning clouds outside are now flying by in dark shades of gray.)

She voices her thoughts — "I don't get it. Doesn't that mean you'll lose the snowball fight?"

Elsa's lips quirk up into a smile. "No."

Anna's lip juts out rebelliously. "Giving up sounds like the easy way out."

Silence had never sounded so loud.

"...No," Elsa finally murmurs, leaden and resigned on labored breath. "It never is."

Her words are still hanging in the air like something heavy when the doors to the ward are swinging open and a nurse comes bustling in, her brown eyes sympathetic and smile caring.

"Come on, honey — your parents are waiting."

Anna sighs, disgruntled, but she gives Elsa's hand one last squeeze before skipping over to the nurse.

"...Wait..."

Elsa's voice races weakly through the air as if it's made of molasses, thick and slow and heavy.

Anna turns instinctively, squirming from underneath the nurse's grasp.

"...I love you, Anna."

:.

The scream is torn out of her throat at one-thirteen p.m., December twentieth.

_"What do you mean, 'Elsa might die tomorrow?!'"_

Silence.

Broken:

_"...Papa...my birthday is tomorrow..."_

:.

Elsa Arendelle dies precisely on Monday, December the twenty-first, 2078, 7:49 a.m., and all Anna remembers thinking is that it had been much too pretty of a day for Elsa to die.

Her death still haunts Anna, plays in her head like a movie — a horrible movie indeed, but one with razor sharp quality and sound. She can still remember the stench of antiseptic tainting the room with its sharp, bitter tang. The feeling of Elsa's frightfully bony arm underneath her fingers, the wan skin papery and dry, stretched taut over sharp angles and knobby protrusions.

It had been frightfully quick. The doctors had disconnected the IV drips. A few wires. The heart monitor by Elsa's bed grows flat and wails shrilly.

She watches when her sister takes in a shuddering breath, one eye cracking open.

_(I'm sorry.)_

Anna thinks she hears the thunderous sound of a thousand and one promises shattering into pieces onto the ground when Elsa lets the breath out.

She doesn't move again.

:.

Mama's hand immediately flies to her mouth.

Papa's jaw works on something stiff.

Anna bawls.

-—

**part the third** :: the living dead

Her birthdays have become bittersweet occasions, marking both the day she had been born and the day Elsa had died. And when it snows, Anna will take one look out of her window and burst out into tears — _god, every single time_ — because it only reminds her of the jarring fact that Elsa broke her promises.

_("We'll be together, forever and ever.")_

_("I promise.)_

_("We can build a snowman another time together, Anna.")_

_("I promise.)_

_("I'll be alright, Anna.")_

_("I promise.)_

Every single fucking one of them.

:.

There are times when Anna will lie in bed and cry silent rivers of tears, all of them only ending up staining her pillowcase into something unrecognizable by the end of the night.

And there will be other times when she throws the pillow across the room, fury and rage overtaking her senses, because _you lied to me, Elsa._

_You lied to me. You said you would come back. You promised._

_And you never came back, Elsa. Why?_

And then there will still be more times when Anna stares at the wall for nigh upon two hours, eyes glassy and blank and unthinking. Filled with everything and nothing.

Empty, because she doesn't even know what to feel anymore.

But slowly, gradually, Anna picks up the shards and shattered bits and puts them together with shaking hands, careful not to cut herself on any jagged ends. She goes to elementary school and makes some new friends and develops a raging passion for anything chocolate.

The trail of broken promises that Elsa had left behind when she died, however, never strays far from her mind.

:.

Her carefully reconstructed world cracks into pieces anew on her eighteenth birthday, and this time around, Anna isn't quite as sure she can pick them back up.

"Anna?"

Her father's voice drifts up the stairs a mere moment before the man does himself, rapping gently on the strawberry blonde's door before allowing himself in.

She is soon smothered by soft cloth and strong grips and a warm hug, allowing herself to be enveloped by the reassuring, familiar circle of her father's arms.

"Happy eighteenth birthday, my girl," he whispers before pulling back, adoration and love clearly gleaming in his eyes, yet interwoven tightly together with sadness.

Anna reaches back for another hug and rests the side of her head on her father's shoulder, closing her eyes and breathing in the calming scent of cedar and smoke that always seemed to cling to him.

"Ah...I have someth..._someone..._I would like you to meet."

He pulls back from her a second time and steps out of the room.

Anna blinks.

A woman with blonde hair replaces him, sidling across the floors on feet that make no sound.

Anna blinks again.

Because she doesn't quite dare to believe.

_"...Elsa?"_ she chokes.

The platinum blonde doesn't even blink at Anna, and this is what she finds most disconcerting of all: this person, this _thing,_ she shows absolutely no emotion at all. Tranquil blue eyes boring into Anna's own, a ghostly pink slash of a mouth superimposed over snowy skin, hands folded loosely behind her back.

"That is what...he has called me, yes," the woman finally says, her eyes flickering to the side momentarily.

_(no)_

_(nonononono)_

Eleven years of checked emotion — _anger sadness fear sorrow confusion fury ELSA — _suddenly come roaring out in a great tidal wave, punching Anna in the chest and sending her reeling, staggering back step after step until her thighs hit the edge of her bed and sending her tumbling onto her mattress. She's breathing fast, heavily, because Elsa's _dead_ and she's not supposed to be _here_ and _what in the world did Papa do?!_

"N-no — _who are you?"_ the redhead manages to whisper, blurry tears spilling through the cracks in her trembling voice. And inside, her emotions are fighting a war with each other — tumultuous, wailing, crying up a storm, because _you look like Elsa_ and _Elsa died thirteen years ago_ and _you're not Elsa_ and **_but _****_no _****_you look like Elsa _**and _elsaelsaelsaelsaelsa_ —

Anna's breathing even more shallowly now, not quite sure what to think — quick, superficial breaths being drawn in and huffed out at quite the rapid pace, leaving no time for air to even be taken in. Her whole world, collapsing into rubble, smoking shambles and pieces around her feet.

"...I am...Elsa," the blonde murmurs, and if Anna didn't know any better, she'd say that the woman sounded unconvinced. "The one...you call your..._sister."_

She says this blankly.

Lifelessly.

Robotically.

Her words hit Anna in the chest like something harsh, peeling back the layers of her skin and bright red flesh, past slivers of white rib bones made of ivory and dragging out a heart stitched together with childish patches of scar tissue and broken promises.

"You're not my sister," she breathes, words clipped and run ragged with anger and sluggish with leaden finality.

The woman doesn't respond to the barb. She merely takes a step forward that looks as though it is the exact same length as all the steps she had taken previously.

"I promised," the woman says quietly.

_("I'll be fine, Anna. I _promise.")

Anna staggers backwards into her room before she even knows where her feet are carrying her, and the door slams shut with a sickening crack, rattling against the wooden frame.

"Don't _ever _say that," and even though she knew that this _thing_ standing right outside her room couldn't hear her, she whispered. A whisper filled with renewed anguish, shattered dreams and broken-glass hearts.

Darkness darting across her expression. Shadows slipping into the cracks of her grimace, shoulders sinking with an invisible weight.

"— Don't _ever_ say that," she chokes, a little louder this time.

There's a pause.

Then the muffled sound resonates across the floor; a soft thud of footsteps, melting away.

_Don't ever promise me anything, ever again._

_Ever. Ever. Ever._

* * *

><p><em>i hope this wasn't too fast-paced <em>D:_ things will be explained next chapter! AND I PROMISE IT WILL GET BETTER SOON (by soon i mean by the end and by the end i mean...idk. __it'll be slightly longer than _streetlight walls _i think_)._  
><em>

_if you're interested in any potential stories i may have coming up, go on my tumblr (astrarisks) and add: /plot-bunnies after the main url._

_all the best._


	2. synthesis

_(uploaded — 10.24.14) _:: _[__i lost at least fifteen hours of sleep over this chapter...it was horrifically difficult to write, so i hope my efforts were worth it. _(~~")_ i would also like to give ten thousand million gazillion thanks to _fruipit, _without whom i'd have never made it past the first paragraph,__ for essentially beta-reading and putting up with my rants and..._everything._ thank you so much, frui. _:)_ (go read her_ snowflake_ if u havent already, in which case ur really missing out _o_O_)__]_ :: _{playlist: _"the sea"; _dj contacreast}_

:.

_I don't own _Frozen_. You can also find this on AO3 and Tumblr._

* * *

><p><strong>Artifice<strong>

.

.

_(ii)_

_you are the loneliest person  
><em>_that i've ever known  
><em>_we're joined at the surface  
><em>_but nowhere else_

* * *

><p><strong>chapter two<strong> :: synthesis

-—

**part the first** :: all our human frailties

Agdar had never considered himself as a man who backed down from any challenges that had been shoved into his career, intentionally or not. As one of the leading geneticists at Corona Inc., he was expected to be able to solve problems: tackle them head-on, make headway upon solving them before they become a nuisance. He had been taught to keep a level head under stressful situations, the voice of reason within a world of chaos. Supposed to be able to innovate, invent, _create._

But no one had ever prepared him for what to do when his elder daughter died at ten and his younger became a ghost at five.

:.

Elsa had Li-Fraumeni syndrome. Agdar knows and had always known it, having seen the results of the standard genetic tests conducted when she had just been birthed. She had been predisposed to cancer — cancer including the leukemia she had eventually succumbed to — from the start, at a disadvantage from the moment she was born.

Yet, he had held faith close: faith that he would be able to discover something that functioned like a cure for Elsa's genetic predisposition to cancer, or maybe at least stalling it. But by the time she began to show symptoms, at nine years of age, he'd _known_ that it was already too late.

And after the very moment Elsa came up to him that day, pale face shining with a sickly, wan glow and declaring that she was tired and she had red spots and bruises on her arms, he requested from his superiors at Corona Inc. that he be allowed to open a new project.

Human cloning.

:.

The director cleared the project two weeks later, albeit with an odd look when he passed the forms across his desk into Agdar's waiting hands.

The blond man only offered a tight smile to his superior before sweeping out of the office.

:.

Agdar had swung by the hospital one day after work, striding through the sliding glass double doors at the entrance to the clinic with resolve and purpose set firmly in his every movement. An empty briefcase wrought of stainless steel and gleaming a bright shade of silver clutched in a pair of steady hands, a few minutes was all it took before he was crossing over to Elsa's bedside, pulling out the chair that had been set by the side of her mattress and settling down within it.

Elsa herself was as drawn and sickly looking as Agdar had ever seen her, and even as he gently pushed aside her blonde bangs, easing it away from a forehead sticky with freezing cold sweat, her eyes flickered open, slits of icy blue peeking out as a sharp contrast to the unhealthy glow of her skin.

"...Daddy?" she rasped, her cracked, tired voice full of broken bits of glass.

His hand stumbled from where it had been at Elsa's bangs, slipping down the side of her face instead to come to rest on her shoulders, almost imperceptibly shaking.

Elsa blinked languidly up at him once, a slow up and down slide of her eyelids, and his heart almost broke right then and there. Because Elsa hadn't called him _Daddy_ since she was four; because Elsa was only _ten_ and already fighting for her life; because right now, right in front of him, Elsa was dying. His daughter was dying, and there wasn't a single _fucking _thing he could have done about it._  
><em>

Except for this. Except for maybe this.

So Agdar allowed himself a sliver of hope, pulled out a long, slim box from his messenger bag, and laid it carefully out onto Elsa's nightstand.

Elsa was still looking at him, hands folded across each other and patiently waiting for an answer.

"...Snowflake," and he used his old term of endearment for her, Elsa's nickname when she had been a baby. "Do you trust me?"

If Elsa was put off by his strange remark, she didn't show it.

_Do you trust me?_ the question echoed.

And she took a while to respond to it, but when she did, it was firm and unyielding and resolute.

"Yes, Daddy. Of course I trust you."

:.

Another week crept by, and the furrow that had been cleaved inside Agdar's heart widened further and further until December twenty-first, when it finally gave out and cracked into two.

When Elsa had finally, unequivocally died from her ailment. While quite morbid, as expected, Anna in particular had taken Elsa's death the hardest and was especially devastated by the fact that she'd never be able to see her sister in flesh and blood again. This, even Agdar could clearly see: the sorrow and utter ruin welling up in large teal eyes, brutal oceans of tears trickling down her face until she stained Idun's shirt a shade of gray two times darker than it had been previously.

Agdar wondered briefly at that time if the resignation that had puttered through him the day before Elsa had been taken out of the hospital made him a bad father. Brilliant scientist as he may have been, he had never developed such a comforting aptitude for dealing with family and his personal life, not having been able to spend enough time around his daughters and his wife as he would have liked after being promoted to the head of the Innovative Genetics Division of the company.

Even as he stared at the inert form of his daughter, lying with death weighing down on every crevice of her hallow cheeks and thin limbs, he clutched ever tighter onto the slim handle of his silver briefcase.

The briefcase that contained her blood samples. _Elsa's_ blood samples.

Her genes. Her DNA sequences. Her being.

And maybe, just _maybe,_ the key to her salvation.

:.

Agdar couldn't even bear to directly look at Anna in the face the days after Elsa's death.

Her bright teal eyes had been thoroughly drained of its characteristic energy and life, turned into something dull and empty, a mere ghost of what once had been solid and flared. Reminded him of better, halcyon days when he and Idun would simply _watch_ Elsa and Anna chase each other through a thick blanket of white snow; Anna scrambling after Elsa all around the house; _ElsaAnna_ and_ AnnaElsa _when now it was only Anna. Reminded him of a happy family, one that was untainted by darkness and loss.

And they reminded him every second of the moment Elsa passed; the moment the breath left her body and the monitor flat-lined.

He didn't realize at the time that the sound would reflect their family for years to come.

:.

Anna began to appear more and more downtrodden as the days went by, her permanent smile replaced by a permanent frown; a quivering bottom lip, always looking as if she was about to burst out into tears. Occasionally, when the front door opened — when _any _door opened, really — Anna would shoot up from her seat, cloudy teal eyes turning bright with clarity and pure, relentless excitement and happiness, and Agdar could almost _see_ Elsa's name riding upon her lips — E-L-S-A, _Elsa, El-sah, ELSAAAA! — _teetering on the edge of being shouted out into the quiet, ambient atmosphere with glee. And then the small ginger would realize that it wasn't Elsa coming home; it wasn't her sister skipping through the doors with her small Winnie the Pooh backpack slung over her shoulders, ready to be dumped onto the ground near the staircase with its owner neatly scooping a giggling Anna up into a tight hug. It wasn't her sister and it would never be her sister, because Elsa was dead.

Elsa was dead.

Elsa was dead.

_Elsa was dead,_ and all the life would drain out of Anna, until she looked as if were _dead,_ too.

It hurt Agdar every single time he saw her react like that, then fall back into misery once she realized that _Elsa wasn't theredeadgoneforever._ Her utter devastation pierced deeper into his heart and soul than any material knife could have, twisting past the bars of his ribcage and hitting him right where it hurt the most.

And Anna _continued to do this,_ even six months after her sister's death, albeit with less and less frequency as time ground mercilessly on.

But every single time it happened, Agdar would feel something twisting painfully in the general vicinity of the space beneath his rib cage, beneath his chest.

Elsa was dead, and he couldn't _(wouldn't)_ let Anna die her own little death as well.

Since he last took it out at the hospital, the day Elsa died, the silver briefcase had sat in the very corner of his socks drawer, stuffed underneath piles upon piles of multicolored cotton, while he battled with his conscience.

Human cloning was still quite the controversial topic, even when eighty years ago, Dolly the sheep had first been cloned. There were still those who trumpeted the cloning of humans as inhumane, a violation of God, something that should never be thought of, less so even exist. And there were still others who touted the idea as the next breakthrough in science. The militarization of genetically engineered beings was quite the hot debate, Agdar faintly recalled.

But as controversial as it may have been, as much flack as he may receive for what he had the full potential to do, it didn't change the fact that _Anna missed her sister._ She missed her so much, it was as clear as the sky was blue; clear as the day was bright, and Agdar feared that his only remaining daughter was slowly killing _herself_ over her sister's death without even knowing it.

He made his decision at that moment.

_If Anna always looks as if Elsa has come home every time the door opens...t__hen I will give her something to look forward to._

:.

"Agdar."

His wife's voice, in the suffocating silence of the kitchen at five o'clock in the morning, could have come flying through the air like a whip, cracking loudly against the oppressive tension that was clearly standing as some unwanted, gigantic elephant in the room.

Agdar couldn't help but flinch, shoulder muscles knotting up underneath his suit (which he still had yet to take off). The incriminating silver briefcase was laid flat out on the table in front of him, its lid closed and strongly shining underneath the fluorescent white lights above. He was to send its contents to his lab tomorrow for preliminary testing; preparation for the grueling work that he knew was about to come.

"...Yes, dear?" he eventually replied, not quite able to turn around to completely face his wife.

Idun apparently decided that she wouldn't give him a choice and pulled up a chair next to his slumped form, placing a tentative hand on his forearm.

"Are you alright?" she asked. "You haven't been sleeping well lately, it seems."

So she had indeed noticed the ever-growing abundance of shadows underneath his eyes. Agdar shifted uncomfortably in his chair and tried not to let his eyes linger too long on the briefcase.

It didn't work.

"...Is that from work?"

Idun sounded rather hesitant, her eyes flickering uncertainly from the inert case Agdar fondled between his hands and her husband's shadowed face.

"It is," he agreed, gathering the handle in between his fingers and closing them around the freezing metal.

"...I apologize; I should probably be on the way already to the company." He dipped forward and planted a light peck onto the side of Idun's cheek — _"I love you"_ — before pulling the briefcase close to his chest, slipping on his shoes, and striding out the door.

He pretended he didn't see his wife casting him a strange, suspicious glance on the way out.

:.

Agdar called a division-wide meeting as soon as he arrived at his lab, setting the metal briefcase carefully on top of the conference table as the scientists on his team slowly trickled in, chatting up a storm even as the raucous sound of chairs scraping against the floor filled the air, a screeching cacophony of murmurs filtering in through his ears.

"Alright, alright!" he shouted over the din as if talking to a class of rowdy first graders, clapping his hands together sharply. "Settle down!"

And gradually, they did. Quiet streams of conversation still waved through the air, but even those faded away into attentiveness as Agdar flicked his thumb over the scanner on lock of the silver briefcase, allowing the pad to register his fingerprint. It flashed green, and with an audible click that sounded like a hammer dropping into sudden silence that reigned in the room, he gently lifted the lid up.

Inside were twenty identical test tubes filled half with very concentrated, dark red residue; the other half with a very pale, yellow-ish liquid.

"...Is that blood?" Belle d'Amour asked uncertainly from where she was sitting two seats down, her soft brown eyes slight with polite curiosity and one thin eyebrow raised to form a neat little question mark.

"In a manner of speaking," Agdar answered shortly. "As of today, we are setting aside all of our current projects, and putting all of our efforts into a new one that will likely suck up much of the time we have."

He let the words hang in the air, taut and trembling, until it sunk in.

The outburst was enormous.

"Agdar, do you honestly expect us to drop _everything_ and start working on a completely new project that we were just informed of its existence ten seconds ago?" came Milo Thatch's exasperated voice.

"What is this project even about?"

"...Are we starting _now?"_

"Whose blood is that, Arendelle?"

The last question, he deigned to answer immediately.

"It is my eldest daughter's," he crisply said, and the silence that followed his proclamation was so sudden it was almost deafening. "Elsa's."

"...Agdar?" Belle asked following a few stunned moments, an uncertain waver in her tone. "What are you trying to —"

"We are going to be the first team of scientists in the world to create a viable human clone," Agdar announced, slamming down his fist onto the table. The resulting bang resounded throughout the entire, shock-still conference room, echoing and loud and absolutely resolute.

"We are going to clone my daughter."

:.

They identified the sequence that caused the Li-Fraumeni syndrome inside Elsa three months after Agdar announced the human cloning project to his team, and this first breakthrough — this first discovery — prompted him to work himself and his team harder than ever.

"That," he snapped, pointing at the damning codes on the DNA sequence displayed wide and bright on the screen in front of him. "The error in there. PT53."

"...Doctor?" the woman working at the head of his genetic splicing division quietly asked, her brown eyes stretched wide in confusion.

"It's the mutated gene," he said, all quite matter-of-factly. "So get rid of it."

"Er...Doctor, we don't quite have the right tools for that — and it's never been done before —"

"Then figure out how to do it," he brusquely snapped. "That is your part of the operation, is it not? Gene splicing?"

"Sir, the entire removal of a section of the genetic code is not quite the same as gene splicing..."

The blond geneticist glared black death at her.

The woman bowed her head in acquiescence and turned back to her DNA samples, the tips of her ears flaming bright red. "...I'll get to it right away, Doctor Arendelle."

Agdar gave her a curt nod and swept out of the lab without another word.

:.

She found a solution within the span of two months.

:.

Despite his early successes with the project, Agdar quickly began to grow frustrated with the pacing his human cloning project was going at, as well as slightly alarmed by the rapid depletion of his blood and cell supplies. He had started out with twenty small vials of separated red blood cells and plasma, each containing the precious sequence of his daughter's DNA. With each successive failure came the misuse and waste of another bit of the precious material, and Agdar was growing antsy at the sheer _multitude_ of failures he had experienced at the hands of this one project. Months upon months of research and hard work would be put into a promising lead, only to reach a dead end, because _this_ section of the genome wasn't functioning properly and they failed to induce meiotic replication in _that_ fertilized egg and _another_ embryo died after merely five hours of its life cycle because it did not have enough nutrients available in its environment to sustain itself.

But he and his team had made several small victories as well. Milo Thatch had developed a nutrient bath in which an embryo could be grown at an accelerated rate, all the while clearly observable inside a specialized vat that had been constructed just for this purpose. They continuously refined their procedures, acting upon them again and again and again until Agdar was positive that anyone from his team would be able to analyze a gel electrophoresis output from the genes on chromosome 22 as casually and quickly as one may read a book.

It is with this one step forward, two steps back method that Agdar forced his team to take as well as himself, methodically slogging through all the trials thrown in front of him for the better half of a decade, constantly fiddling and refining the procedures that would ultimately lead to the perfect human clone. The clone of Elsa.

Elsa, brought to life once more, for Anna.

So it wouldn't be _just Anna _any longer.

_ElsaAnna, AnnaElsa._

Just like how it used to be.

Together again.

And after thirteen years of tireless, boundless work; limits that had been held as law in the scientific community shattered beneath his hands and those of his team, it happens._  
><em>

A-Twenty wakes at precisely eleven-twenty-nine a.m., November third, 2091, on a metal hospital gurney in Lab 23BA.

When she opens her eyes — eyes the color of the coldest ice — he thinks that his heart may be about to leap out of his chest.

His work. His team's work. All of it, for the past thirteen years, all of it pays off in the end.

(Even if he had to sacrifice almost everything and a little bit more in the process.)

:.

_it-me who I am _blinks.

White glow. Bright. Very bright. It turns. Move. Its eyes. Blind.

"Hello?"

Swinging. Cool and smooth. It touches. It sees. Blue circle colors. _Eyes._ Hands.

"Can you hear me?"

_yes hear you can I where I wHO am_

Eyes turn. Swivel right. Up, it. Up. Look up. Angular features. More blue. Blue. Two blue colors. Ovular. Long nose. Blond. Facial hair.

"...Twenty?"

"Yes," _it-who am I person no thing thing it IT_ says. Cracked voice. Dry. Stretching. It aches. Over.

Croaking. "Who...are...you?"

"I am your Creator," _it-thing white coat white WhITe colors he you eyes blue who are_ says authoritatively. "Your Creator and your father."

_father man creator yes creator Creator with a capital C you Father who me_

"Who...am I?" _it-me mYself I who am I Creator Father_ forces out. Touching. Long white fingers, it sees. Probing. Pinching cheeks. Wiping cold dry palms. Two eyes. Bump. Nose. Patting wet hot things. Lips. Mouth.

"...May I ask you to lie down once more?"

_Creator order it _"lie-down" _table metal light._

Bare skin touches. There is a surface. Cold. It shivers.

"...Will be just a moment..." comes a murmur.

Paper rustling. Sounds. Loud, biting. Uncomfortable. Finger twitching it sees.

Sees.

Nothing.

-—

**part the second** :: 21 questions

She blinks and is immediately assaulted by a bright, white light.

Wincing from the sharpness, she quickly reaches up with her arms to cover her eyes, turning her head away instinctively from the radiant beam.

"Response to light stimuli seems to be functional now," comes a muffled voice to her right.

A scratching sound drifts in through her ear. She tries to turn to the right, and squints at the two fleshy blobs in her hazy vision. One is holding a round yellow stick, quickly drawing the tip across a slip of paper attached to a thin wooden surface.

She lets out a strangled noise, propping one elbow up beneath her in a futile attempt to hoist herself up.

One of the blobs draws nearer.

"Ah, lie down, Twenty. Please, I implore you."

The voice is lilted with kindness. Masculine and soft, calming her down. She settles back down onto her perch, pushing a hand against a single eye to attempt and clear her vision.

"I assume your sight is still a little fuzzy?" the same voice asks again quietly.

"...Yes," she replies. "It is."

"A side effect of the stabilizing gene mods we have just used. It will correct itself in no time," the voice assures kindly.

"...Thank you...Creator."

"Father," he corrects. "I am to be your father...Twenty."

He sounds the barest bit uncomfortable saying "twenty," but she chooses to ignore it.

"Father," she dutifully repeats.

"Tell me what you are thinking," he suggests. "Exactly what you are thinking."

"You are my Creator and...father," she slowly begins after a pause, letting the words spill out of her mouth. "You are a man. Your voice is comforting. My vision is unclear, but you say it will get better soon, and so I will believe you. I do not know where I am, yet I would like to find out. I do not know why I have just woken up, as I cannot seem to quite recall anything before it, except for a fuzzy recollection that tells me that you once told me you were my Creator, and father."

She pauses here. Then:

"Who am I?"

She thinks she can see his lips curve upward into an excited, happy smile.

"Twenty...your name is to be Elsa. Elsa Arendelle."

The name — _her_ name, _her_ new name — falls from his lips like a clashing symphony, bittersweet and conflicted in its execution.

She — _Elsa, Elsa, Elsa; your name is Elsa_ — waits.

"And I promise you, I will tell you _exactly_ who you are."

:.

The Creator, her father — he takes her to a place he calls _home_ a week later she woke up on the metal stretcher, a day after she was brought into existence.

It's not a modestly sized house, not at all: it appears to be more of a mansion. The entire building is made of some glittering white substance for which she has no name but refracts the dazzling afternoon sunlight in jagged fractals of gold and white. There are gauzy, baby blue curtains drawn over windows, shielding in the inside of the home from any outsiders' prying eyes.

Elsa glances up uncertainly at all the majestic grandeur in front of her, great beams of mottled granite pushing up against a pristine white roof, soaring upward and reaching towards the sky. The entrance doors alone must have cost ten times more than she herself would ever be worth, thick and made of dark oak, its wood grain clearly visible, and buffed to a brilliant shine as they were.

The jingle of keys sounds from behind her, and Elsa turns around to take in the sight of her Creator, her father, ascending the steps to stand by her, giving her a glance.

"Are you ready to meet your sister?" He asks this quite calmly.

Elsa only gives a brief nod as a response.

:.

"Agdar?"

The voice comes out of thin air the instant they step through the door; Elsa and the Creator _(Father),_ soft and lilting. Elsa notes how...her _father's_ spine stiffens for the barest flash of a second, before he relaxes once more and smoothly strides forward to greet the figure appearing at the end of the entrance hall._  
><em>

"Idun," he says, and then draws the brown-haired woman into a tight hug. "I...I would like to introduce you to someone."

Idun's smile drops down a few notches, but she manages to hitch it back up just as quickly, although there's something strained and artificial about the gesture of happiness where before it was natural and there were no plastic, strained grins.

"And who might this someone be?"

The Creator beckons, and Elsa glides forward on light, uncertain feet.

As soon as Idun's soft green eyes meets Elsa's blue, something inside of the older woman's expression freezes and then shatters into a million splinters, her face falling so _much_ that Elsa didn't even know it had been possible for someone who had been smiling warmly a millisecond beforehand suddenly turn so afraid and upset the next.

Elsa can see it all, right in Idun's eyes: anger, fear, and terror. Her face contorts like something out of a horror movie, mouth opening and closing in speechless surprise — and not the good kind of surprise, either.

And Elsa sees her lips work to form a single word.

Her given name.

_Elsa._

"...Agdar," she breathes, turning hastily onto her husband. "Dear lord, Agdar, what have you _done?"_

The Creator mutters something lowly to her, too quiet for Elsa to hear, before he strides over to the stiff platinum blonde and places a protective arm over her shoulders. Elsa winces internally and shrinks away as Idun's burning gaze snaps back to her, a glare that's so full of ire and _anger _that she can't help but flinch away from the sheer, intense negativity contained within the look.

"Come on," he murmurs into Elsa's ear, steering her away from the fuming brown-haired woman. "She will...adapt, I am sure. We can go meet your sister now."

_Your sister._

"...Anna, yes?" she recollects hazily, remembering the Creator saying something about her sister, a girl named _Anna_.

The Creator's eyes flash with something melancholy.

"Yes," he quietly agrees. "Anna."

:.

Her door is painted a light shade of blue, soft and smooth and not the least bit threatening. Yet, Elsa couldn't help but experience some strange feeling course throughout her body like an electric shock, setting her nerves on fire and heartbeat racing in agitation.

She watches apprehensively as Agdar raises on fist and plants three firm knocks onto the door.

"Anna?" he calls softly, placing another few taps onto the slab of wood before he twists the handle of the door himself.

The door opens but a crack and remains that way for perhaps a second; then, it's flung open and a pile of white cloth and red hair all but leaps into the Creator's arms, which squeeze the girl who has just emerged from the room just as tightly. Just as lovingly.

Elsa watches them exchange a few words, too quiet for her to hear, but the Creator pulls back from the girl quickly enough, flashing a final wan smile toward her before descending back down the stairs, allowing the platinum blonde to catch her first eyeful of her new...sister.

_So...this is Anna._

The young girl in front of her has soft locks that are cascading down her shoulders in a waterfall of strawberry blonde, framing a round face and small, upturned nose. Smatterings of freckles are dotted all over the bridge of her nose, dusted lightly across her rosy cheeks, all leading up to a pair of large teal eyes that are currently widened in surprise and shock and...wait a moment, was that _anger?_

_"...Elsa?" _the redhead chokes.

"That is what...he has called me, yes," Elsa finally responds, slightly put of by the hesitance and sheer disbelief in Anna's tone of voice.

She doesn't know why herself, but Elsa instinctively reaches a hand forward — reassurance that she intends no harm to this Anna — but Anna stumbles back with a choked cry falling from her lips, hands flung out in front of her as if to ward Elsa away. Elsa immediately drops her own outstretched arm as if she had been burned, pulling it close to her chest as she warily eyed the redhead spluttering indignantly in front of her.

""N-no —" the redhead stammers, shaking her head quickly. There is an evident tremble in her voice, sorrow and confusion leaking heavily through cracks in her composure, her teal eyes beginning to reflect the light above her.

_"Wh-who are you?"_ she finally manages to gasp out, sitting heavily down onto her bed, fingers fisting tightly into her pink and green patterned sheets.

While she is a little concerned for her new sister's sanity, Elsa takes a tentative step into Anna's room and, with her eyes fixed onto Anna's own, replies, "...I am...Elsa. Ah, the one...you call your...sister."

Anna's shaking her head even more rapidly now, her lips forming silent words that Elsa cannot hear and cannot read, but it's clear by the confusion and _terror_ in her teal gaze that it is cannot be anything too positive.

Elsa's musings are confirmed not two moments later:

_"You're not my sister,"_ whispers Anna, still heavily breathing, and her words are short, spat out like acid and poison.

Elsa frowns internally at the redhead's words, but instead she takes a step forward, caging Anna in with her gaze.

"I promised," she says, quietly.

_I promised my Creator — my father — that I'd be like a sister to you._

But if anything, this only sets Anna off even more. Her lower lip trembling, Elsa can't tell whether it's sadness or rage or a potent mixture of both, Anna immediately slams the door into the platinum blonde's face with a resounding crash. Elsa stumbles back in shock from the piece of painted blue wood that had suddenly been swung toward her nose with intent to harm, her palms slapping noisily against the wall in her haste.

There are little noises coming from behind Anna's firmly shut door, noises that Elsa realizes are sobs after a few seconds of puzzled deliberation, and words waft out through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor as well.

"— Don't _ever_ say that."

And if there's anything that Elsa knows, it is when to back off from a situation she has absolutely no control over.

So she steps away from Anna's door, and lets it go.

:.

She knocks on the redhead's door every single day for two weeks and a little bit of her hope is torn away every day Anna doesn't answer, until she's left with nothing but mere shreds of what used to be dreams.

:.

Idun, as Elsa soon learns, is one hundred percent unsupportive of the blue-eyed girl's very existence.

Every time the platinum blonde is left in the same room as the woman who is, supposedly, to be her mother, a belligerent sort of atmosphere sparks into existence, birthed from the hostile green depths of a woman who never missed a chance to throw angered, dark looks in Elsa's general direction.

Quite honestly, Elsa cannot begin to fathom exactly _why_ both Anna and Idun have had such strongly negative reactions to her presence. It appeared to have been simply been a matter of her _existing,_ something of which Elsa finds terribly unfair, because she never _asked_ to be brought into existence. She never asked to wake up freezing in the middle of a table, her back pressed flat against cold metal, unable to remember who she had been and where she was beforehand. She never asked for _any _of it, and they were blaming her, for _existing?_

Elsa dearly wants to incinerate the very thought.

_Bullshit._

:.

Anna finally comes around to see her one pallid afternoon, around a week after she first shut Elsa out. It's the type of day when the watery winter sunlight is struggling to leak in through the gaps in between the blonde's window blinds in long shafts of pale gold, fading even before it reaches the ground.

Elsa thinks it quite appropriate. Her mood matches the dim nature of the morning sunlight exactly.

"...I have some things I want to ask you," comes the announcement.

Elsa wildly jumps from where she had been folding clothes, startled at the belligerent tone of voice traveling leaps and bounds through the air to snake in through her ear, ragged and harsh. The soft piles of colored fabric tumble from her shaking hands and land forgotten upon the teak floor. Even as she whirls around, she can already sense the wave of animosity and hesitation tumbling off of her..._sister_ in great droves, all coalescing into something that would probably resemble a great big neon sign hanging over her head, flashing garish question marks.

Anna's expression is brittle and drawn, her pretty teal eyes long having turned into something that has no name but is much too red and much too swollen. She knows that she will never say it to..._her sister's_ face, but sometimes, Elsa can hear her muffled crying through the blue-painted plaster walls, as their two rooms had been rather thoughtfully placed adjacent to each other.

And she cannot even begin to fathom what_ she_ has done wrong. If anything, it is Anna who has cleaved a great chasm between the two of them ever since the fateful day Elsa took her first steps into the redhead's room, one filled with ice and darkness and silence. They haven't had any sort of contact for nearly half a week; one would think that Elsa had wronged Anna simply by existing. Elsa hasn't even seen her down at dinner for the past three days, leaving the blonde in the middle of a horribly tense meal, where she picked at her food and tried to pretend that the Creator — _no, no, no; _Father, _Elsa, Father —_ wasn't slightly wilting in perfect tandem with the spinach he had scooped on his fork underneath the sharp, accusing glare of Idun.

_(Mother, Elsa. She's your mother now.)_

_(But...Idun doesn't like you, Elsa. Mothers...are supposed to love their children.)_

_(...Technicalities.)_

_(Technicalities don't change the fact that she doesn't like you.)_

So it is with these thoughts running at light speed through her mind when Elsa shortly nods to Anna's statement and pads over to the feather mattress, seating herself on the very edge with her palms placed flat over her kneecaps, knuckles turning white with how hard she's bunching dyed blue cotton and skin and flesh underneath her fingers.

"...Er, would you like to sit down?" she says to her feet quite softly, quite plainly.

A moment of clear hesitation hangs between the two of them. Anna's red-rimmed eyes flick from Elsa to the waiting spot besides her, then back to Elsa again.

The blonde, for her part, does not fidget underneath the other girl's searching stare.

After a few moments of deliberation, the strawberry blonde nods quickly in acquiescence and sits beside Elsa, quickly wrapping her arms around herself in a protective cocoon.

_Well...that's a start, isn't it?_ Elsa dryly thinks to herself.

"...So, what is it that you would like to know?"

Anna sucks in a breath, her eyes darting to Elsa's face once more. The watery sunlight bathes half her face in a wan glow, crystallizing into ovals of white gold, while leaving black shadows to encroach the other in darkness.

When she speaks, her voice is as fractured as the light that is beamed across her face.

"Why are you here?"

Elsa's fingers tighten around her kneecaps, wringing the fabric uncomfortably between her hands.

Why _is_ she here, anyway? To make Anna happy?

Anna, who's sitting right next to her right now, but who couldn't feel further away? Anna, who's rebuffed any and all attempts Elsa had made to get closer to her?

Anna, who apparently doesn't even _want_ to be happy around Elsa?

So Elsa, after a few moments of deliberation, quietly responds, "...Do you want an honest answer?"

The strawberry blonde looks rather indignant at her remark, "Of course I do!"

"Well, then...I am not quite sure." She looks at Anna straight in the eyes, direct and confrontational. Calm pools of the coolest blue meeting teal, which are flickering with the beginnings of uncertainty and defensiveness.

"What — ? What d'you even _mean,_ 'I don't know'?"

"The Cr..._Father_...told me that I am supposed to be your sister," says Elsa, quite bland and unassuming. "Although, I must say that you are making it rather difficult for me to get to even know you."

Anna's eyes immediately light up with rebelliousness and denial. "What are you even — ?" she splutters, before Elsa interrupts her, blue eyes still fixated unblinkingly upon her_ sister._

"Would you care to tell me why you think that I am here?" she patiently continues, settling further back on the soft bed. The mattress springs squeak and Anna visibly flinches away from her.

Anna's lips tighten.

"Well, I don't know, either," she defensively says, folding her arms over her chest. "That's kinda why I asked you."

Elsa quirks an eyebrow.

"I _mean,"_ and Anna's enormous sigh escapes past her lips in a rush of mint-scented air even as she sinks back into the bed, knees tucked beneath the circle of her arms, "Okay, look...I'm sorry for how I treated you the — like, during the last week. Ignoring you, I mean. But" — a defensive note creeps into her tone once more — "you just...randomly showed up at my door with Dad one day. And you look _exactly_ like El — l-like my sister. Like you could be an older version of her. So who _are_ you? Why are you here? _Why_ did Dad bring you home, and what are you even doing?" Her voice quavers. "I'm just so...so _confused."_

_So am I,_ Elsa bitterly thinks, _so am I._

"...I do not mean to cause you any harm," she says instead, picking her words carefully. "But...I will say that...it is true that I do not completely understand the relationship that you had with your...sister. If I can claim to understand it at all, that is.

"But I truly _do_ want to get to know who you are." And Elsa really _tries_ to inject some faint degree of sincerity in her tone, because she really does mean it — although she fears it comes out blander than she would have liked. But she is curious about this girl. The one she had seen in pictures that had captured a brilliant smile that shone with confidence and verve even through the glossy ink on photograph paper. The one in front of her right now, the one who is supposed to be her sister yet remains a distant and cynical stranger.

"I am not actively trying to replace anything you had with...y-your...," she fumbles with this word, "...your _Elsa,"_ she finishes, and the name feels like plastic in her mouth, the name that the Creator _(father, goddammit)_ had given to her, sending foreboding chills down her spine. "Honestly."

"Then why does Dad call _you_ Elsa, too?" Anna fires back, quickly unfolding her legs and springing to her feet. Her teal eyes are sparking with anger and frustration. Her voice begins to quaver dangerously. "Why does he t-tell me that _you're supposed to be_ — supposed to b-be my sister now? _Who are _you_ even supposed to be?_ If Dad keeps on saying that y-you're _Elsa,_ you're my _sister,_ then y-you're like a replacement f-for _Elsa!_ Who are you _supposed_ to b-be — supposed to be t-to me?!"_  
><em>

In a smaller voice, spoken half to herself, "Why would he ever _do_ that?"

Her frustration is evident, thirteen years of brutally suppressed anguish and loss come bursting out in a great tidal wave of words.

Elsa fidgets and plays with her fingers.

"I...I don't know..."

_("Twenty...your name is to be Elsa. Elsa Arendelle.")_

_Twenty,_ Elsa vaguely recollects. _He called me Twenty._

"...He called me 'Twenty,'" she mutters, rising to her feet and padding across the room to her dresser, unfolded clothes still spilling out of the drawers' bowels.

"What?"

Anna's voice is still heavy, fractured and bogged down with the weight of the world.

The platinum blonde turns, her expression carefully wiped clean, "He called me 'Twenty' before he told me that my name was 'Elsa Arendelle.'"

"Twenty's a number. Not a name, _Elsa,"_ is Anna's curt respond (clearly, she had regained her composure) before she settles back down into her former hunched position on the bed.

Elsa turns back around. "I am merely stating what I remember," and there an icy touch has most certainly creeped into her voice now, crackling at the edges and frosting over her vowels. Anna's eyebrows furrow into a deep frown at Elsa's suddenly chilly tone, long dark crevices appearing on the smooth contours of her forehead.

A moment of tense silence flashed between the two of them. Elsa's back is turned once more and she can't see what Anna's doing, but she can certainly hear the muffled thump of a pair of feet hitting the floor.

"Yeah...whatever." Anna's voice has turned dreadfully flat, and this for some odd reason, is what niggles at Elsa the most. Anna isn't expressing hurtfulness or anger or confusion or _anything_ at all, really, a sharp contrast from the heavy emotion that Elsa heard ringing in her words every other time.

"I still don't know what you're doing here," the redhead continues, her words terribly blunt and heavy-handed in their execution. "What Dad's trying to do by bringing you back home, why he would call you...'Twenty,' and then the name of my sister. I don't even know _what_ you are. Are you, like, some copy of Elsa? Because you literally look like you could be a carbon copy of her, if she was as old as you seem to be, now."

Elsa wheels around.

"I am _not_ a copy of anyone," she says. "I am my own being."

Anna only bites her lip and turns away, facing the door.

"Do you know what I see when I look at you?" she asks slowly, the lightly crumpled back of her shirt and twin strawberry blonde braids the only things Elsa can see of her.

"You see...Elsa."

_"My_ Elsa," Anna snaps immediately, surprising and vicious. Her shoulders lift as she takes a deep breath, apparently to compose herself. "I...I just..._argh!_ I see _her._ In _you._ You have the same hair, you have the same eyes; hell, you even have the same, like, teeth! You look _exactly _like her. And like, literally the only different between _her_ and _you,_ I feel like, is the fact that she was fun and you're about as interesting as a sack of chalk dust."

_...I strongly suspect that being compared to a sack of chalk dust was intended to be a pointed insult._ Elsa frowns slightly at the vehement accusation.

"But my point is...you're like ninety-nine percent an exact copy of...of..._Elsa._ And I just...I can't handle that right now. I..._we_ can't handle that right now. My...my mom, neither..."

A moment of thick silence commences after the redhead's penetrating words. Anna's shoulders hunch ever the tighter together and she stiffly walks out of the room without another comment.

Elsa places a trembling hand on the edge of her drawer.

It's taken her quite the while, but she reaches a conclusion based on Anna's words with the barest hint of dismay.

Somewhere, some time, _she_ had driven a wedge between the Arendelle family. She doesn't know how, only that she has. Mother wasn't speaking to Father, Father wasn't speaking to Mother, Mother definitely threw eyes made of sharp daggers at Elsa every time she saw her, Anna was holed up in her room and crying half the day away and she was so _confused_ and Elsa was driving herself mad not being able to completely understand why, and Father would try to console the redhead and he'd be thrown out of the room, looking like a defeated puppy, faster than Elsa could even blink.

She buries her head in her hands, loosely threading her fingers through platinum blonde waves that technically aren't even her own.

_"You literally look like you could be a carbon copy of her, if she was as old as you seem to be, now."_

Blinks furiously, trying to will away the sting in her blue eyes.

Artificial, imaginary, someone _else's._

_"You're like an exact copy of...of..._Elsa._ And I just...I can't handle that right now."_

A copy of someone else. Never to be her own person.

_(And Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, what kind of person would ever break the bonds between a family?)_

_(A monster.)_

-—

**part the third** :: a penny for your souls

The day after her disastrous exchange of words with Anna, the Creator slips into Elsa's room and asks if she would be willing to come back to him to the lab for her weekly check-up.

_Just to make sure all your vitals are okay,_ he tells her. _That you're doing fine._

Elsa is more than happy to oblige, eager to escape from oppressive atmosphere that has come to hang like a heavy funeral shroud around the manor, sharp knives of discontent and suspicion all directed toward her direction, whether they come from Idun (which is too often) or Anna (they simply try to avoid each other by this point). So she slips into the Creator's car without complaint and sits in a wonderfully comfortable silence only broken by the soft stream of Brahms drifting from the automobile's radio.

They arrive at Corona Inc. approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later, Elsa hopping out of her seat with the Creator and the two of them wandering into the doors of the large research clinic.

He takes her to a simple diagnostics room, with a metal sink shunted to the corner and an operating table in the center of the room the only pieces of furniture that decorated the whole area. Elsa boosts herself up onto the edge of the table and lets the Creator check her pulse rate, breathing, reflexes; she does all of this with an apathy that she has not been able to shake off ever since the confrontation with...Anna.

Her supposed sister.

_(Carbon. Copy.)_

Elsa shifts uncomfortably and cannot quite meet the Creator in the eyes after the dark memory resurfaces.

The Creator _(no, you've been saying it wrong the whole time — it's Father...)_ leaves her to her own devices after his check-up, and quite frankly, after but five minutes fiddling around and swinging her legs over the edge of the table, Elsa is experiencing a mindbogglingly severe case of boredom.

_He never said that I could not...explore the lab, did he?_

Slipping off of the metallic bench, she glides across the cool floor on whispering feet, which are clad in nothing but curiosity and milky white skin. Pulling the sheer robe tightly around her body, she exits the claustrophobic space and steps into a long, brightly-lit hallway.

There are several doors littered at even intervals set in the walls of the corridor, each of them imprinted with a string of letters and numbers that made absolutely no sense to Elsa whatsoever.

One set of doors catches her attention; the pair that was set at the very end of the hallway, gleaming battleship gray and silver gunmetal in the streams of artificial light that arced through the air.

Taking quick and long strides, she approaches the door cautiously, stainless steel reflecting slivers of white light, bathing her face in a soft, ethereal glow.

Elsa's hand stretches out, almost hesitantly — a pale appendage floating in midair, trembling with both curiosity and apprehension even as it draws nearer to the metal. She reaches her decision not two moments later, giving the doors a slight push.

They swing open smoothly and without a sound. The darkness spills out from inside the yawning cavern of the chamber within, pooling at her feet into a lake of liquid shadows.

It should have been foreboding, looking back on it. The darkness of the whole place. It should have whispered in her ear, given her the slightest push back, the barest huff of a breeze whispering, _"__Do not venture further. Do not go in."_

Yet Elsa did not hear, and she takes a few steps further into the lab, sharp blue eyes probing through the shroud of the night that seemed to hang heavily over every contour of the room. Softening and shaping sharp edges, melding everything into curves and radial gradients of grays to greys to empty blacks, until everything has become mere indistinct shapes, nothing more than blobs.

So it comes as a surprise to her when the overhead lights flicker on, washing clean white light over every surface and burning away the darkness, giving way to sharpened clarity. Elsa blinks rapidly in the sudden dazzle, hissing softly at the abruptness, one hand immediately flying up to shield her eyes.

It takes her a few more moments to get used to the blazing lights, and Elsa slowly peels her fingers away from her eyes, squinting at the pristine and shined lab tables all around her, not a speck of dust to be seen. They are bedecked with some blinking scientific equipment of which she cannot place a name to and some rolls of thin, waxen paper. Hesitantly padding toward a table, she prods at a still-humming machine, some block of quivering opaque gel inside a box with thin black lines scattered in seemingly random columns beneath.

_1A-20,_ the sticker on the top of the device reads.

She turns away after a moment of consideration and wanders further into the lab, hands falling supine to her sides. Head twisting to the left, then the right, then the left again, trying to take in everything at once.

Because this is like her birthplace, she realizes. This is where she had been brought into existence, where she had first stretched open her eyes to meet the cool blue of her Creator's — _Father,_ she quickly, dazedly corrects herself, _Father_ — stumbled out of a smooth metal operating table on shaking legs quite unused to supporting the weight of a body. Arms folded across her chest as she stood quite still, wondering vaguely, _who am I_ and _what am I doing here_ and _where is this place?_

Elsa's eyes flutter expressionlessly for a passing second before she turns to the side, another set of doors greeting her when she does so — these ones marked with flashing red letters, bold as bold could be: _AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY._

She gives an experimental push to the doors, which don't even so much as budge this time. Frowning slightly, she glances to the side, eyes lighting upon a keyboard attached to the metallic silver framework of the doors, blinking up quite innocently at her, asking for a password.

Elsa is only starting to turn around with a hint of disappointment when the set of doors beep behind her, sending her whirling around again, only to face Agdar straight in the eyes again.

"Tw — _Elsa?"_ he asks quickly, surprise leaking through of his baritone voice. Elsa notes that he immediately retreats back into the space behind the sliding doors, clearly trying to block whatever is behind him. Blue eyes narrowing, the platinum blonde slips to the side and ducks out through the space underneath his outstretched arms.

She ends up nearly choking on her own spit at what she sees.

_What in the world — ?_

Large glass cylinders, a whole row of them, each filled with some glowing, sickly blue liquid. Pale _things_ in each of them, floating in what appears to be suspended animation, but Elsa can't _breathe_ because the figures all resemble..._her._ Some less so than others, but it's clear as day:

_They look exactly like me._

_Which means they look exactly like...like that...original _Elsa...

_...What do they call copies of living beings again?_

_...Clones. They are clones..._

_...But if they are clones...then what am _I?

Anna's words come back to her, echoing ominously in her mind:_ "You literally look like you could be a carbon copy of her, if she was as old as you seem to be, now."_

She did. She _does._

Because she _is_ a carbon copy.

It hits her then, a high-speed jet plane straight to the chest, and she's tearing out of the room as fast as her legs can carry her, ignoring the Creator's calls for her to come back, that he can explain this, that he's sorry she had to see it, but no, no, _no he can't, he'll never be able to justify what he did,_ because what in the _world_ were those things, exactly?

They were the failed experiments. The failed _clones._

_Clones._

_She_ could have ended up as a failed experiment, just like _them._

Crumpling to her knees in a trembling heap, shock still stretching its jagged claws through her body, it sends her keeling to the ground in terror.

Elsa's throat convulses once, then twice, and then she promptly heaves her breakfast out onto the washed white tiles beneath her.

_Failed clones._

Chanting a ceaseless mantra through her head.

_Failed. Failed. Failed._

All nineteen of them.

_(And you, Elsa, you _— you_ are lucky number Twenty.)_

* * *

><p><em>(no, elsa didn't know she was a clone until the very end. <em>#_#_) science, unfortunately, is never perfect. _:/ _anyway, plot's ramping up next chapter (why_ hello_ hans~) __some discussions on _artifice _i took w/ frui here (no spaces)__: _**simp. ly/publish/bfKW8l**__. _i'm also doing nanowrimo this year, and it's elsanna...__so that's coming your way as soon as i finish ___artifice__._ you can find more info here: ___**simp. ly/publish/TgRDdZ**

_all the best._


	3. oscillate

_(uploaded — 12.16.14) _:: _[alright, i gave up__. think about it, this chapter would have come so much later if i didn't. _:P_ this was originally going to push past 20k words with the fuckton of new material i was struggling to introduce and squeeze into one tiny chapter but in the end, i decided to cut it into two chapters due to the sheer amount of...well, stuff. unfortunately, that also means that a) this is kind of a boring chapter featuring much hans in part two (if there's one thing i'll say about this, it's "don't jump to conclusions")__ and b) the elsanna (or pre-elsanna) has been pushed back another chapter or two. sorry. _:/_ re:_ caradetarta,_ it's 8 chapters. possibly 9 now, bc of the way the scenes played out.]_ :: _{playlist: _"immortals"; _big hero 6 ost}_

:.

_I don't own _Frozen_. You can also find this on AO3 and Tumblr._

* * *

><p><strong>Artifice<strong>

.

.

_(iii)_

_i'm still comparing your past_  
><em>to my future<em>  
><em>it might be your wound<em>  
><em>but they're my sutures<em>

* * *

><p><strong>chapter three<strong> :: oscillate

-—

**part the first** :: inches of humanity

_December 29, 2091_

_So um...I'm kinda pulling you out of mothballs because like, I'm confused. And I used to write in you_ all _the time. Like ever since...Elsa gave you to me for my fourth birthday. Or maybe it was fifth? I mean, I had really bad handwriting back then, looking back on it (still do, but come on gimme some credit! it's slightly more legible now!) but don't all babies do? anyway I remember that I'd write in you every day and all that other sentimental crap and things and refer to you as like a conscious being and whatever. but I..._

_Yeah. I'm confused, so...I don't know, it's kinda cliché and stuff but I hope that me keeping a journal, diary, you—whatever_ now_ will help me sort out some of my thoughts. So...maybe I pulled you out just because my pare**scribblescribblescribble**._

_Actually, never mind. I mean I'm grateful for what they've done to raise me and like...I know they love me. And I love them too. but just _this._ papa never told me about her. I mean of _course_ I know what he does and stuff. Like braniac stuff, or...something. Something about DNA and biology. I think. I. ok it doesn't matter, just I'm so ang**scribble** annoyed that he didn't tell me about this clone woman _thing._ Whatever. Whatever it is, whatever the hell she is. Going around and claiming that she's Elsa?! ? I just don't how to feel. Well, I do, obviously, but I_ don't know._ ...It's difficult to explain i guess. I know I'm repeating myself and I will repeat myself over and over again but...this Elsa clone person thing, she's throwing everything off. Um, _not_ okay, thanks!_

_Oh, um. oops. But I got drawn off on a tangent there. Kinda. It's still about Elsa, what I wanted to say. Or at least was intending to before like I wrote that huge paragraph thing...ugh okay, I'm doing it again. Um. Yeah, so..._

_...I dreamed about her today. Again. I've had these dreams for a long time, just saying._

_It's different every time and if I tried to tell you all the different ways I **scribblescribblescribble** see her die again and again, I'd need more than the seventy-three pages in here that haven't been scribbled in. But I guess I'll tell you about this time..._

_This time...there was nothing, nothing but her, and death. No ghost rose from her body. No ethereal phosphorescent spirit of anything. I stood there and did nothing. Because...argh! What could I do?! I couldn't do shit. I couldn't _ever_ do anything. Can't ever._

_So I watched her die. again._

_fucky fucky fuck**scribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribble**_

_But I mean...meh. **scribblescribblescribblescribblescribble** anyway, that it helps to realize that her departure from my life and humanity had no relation to what happened next, to what I know happened next. Funerals and old men in somber black suits and ties and smelled like old people. The methodical sequence of gurney unfolding and white bag unzipping. It had nothing to do with Elsa, or her vitality. Like, her life didn't fit into any bag. Because it's larger than life._

_And...hell. Fucking hell. I don't know why, but this one dream, it brought back so many feelings and so little memories. Of how I felt when Elsa died. The days after._

_The weeks passed, then the months. I don't remember much of it, because...well, I tried to block it out. Looks like it was effective, huh?..._

_I don't know. I don't know anything. Some days, I am nearly paralyzed. Other times, I feel **scribblescribble** this...well it's strange. A strange, disappreciative feeling. Like maybe something I'd feel when playing a game with house money._

_._

_...-_

_It's the fact that our life together was really gone, and tr**scribble** carrying on without Elsa was and_ still is_ exactly that, _without her. _I am constantly reminded what Elsa had told me before_. _Like that thing about giving up in a snowball fight. Or something...um I don't really remember. Something like:_

"Giving up...is never the easy way out. It...never is."

_...Okay...oh god, I can't remember exactly! But...I'll worry about that later. That was kinda what she said. It was hella philosophical, that's all I really can remember..._

_I just...fuck, I don't know. Like...it turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all _wrong,_ y'know? The waves and spikes of...loss, and pain...I don't — they don't arrive predictably in time or severity. It's not_ just_ an anniversary, or my birthday, that brings the loss to my mind, or someone else's reminicences, nor even being in a nice restaurant where me and Elsa had once laughed and played together. It's in the grocery aisle with Papa, clutching tightly onto his hand, passing the crisp romaine lettuce and recalling how Elsa tried to teach me how to make frickin' Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad that I would agree to eat (and still is). Or when I'd see a cartoon rerun in an airport departure lounge, and it's one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon so many years earlier that _we_ had passed together, we as in _me and Elsa_, we as in _sisters._ Or on the rise of a full moon **scribblescribblescribblescribblescribble** know that Elsa, from the day that I...like, you know, saw her. don't really remember it but whatever...like Elsa used to always quote from Winnie the Pooh, "How lucky I am to have something that makes**scribblescribblescribble**_

_Okay, looking back on it...too painful. Don't want to think about it right now. Maybe later..._

_...I don't know. I don't know why I need to mention Winnie the Pooh to you but I liked that show and Elsa liked it too! And what I'm trying to say is that...me missing Elsa...it's not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief ninety-nine percent of the time. It's like phantom-limb pain. Like what those soldiers who lost a limb, returning home, say they sometimes feel. Something in the nothing, right._

_It aches, it throbs, and there's nothing there but..._

_...I don't ever want it to go away._

_I wonder what it says about me, about _her,_ that this Elsa clone thing dulls it somewhat. But I feel like I'm doing Elsa's memory an injustice by even so much _accepting_ this clone Elsa, whatever the hell she..it...is...as a replacement. I'm sp confused and so lost and I don't know what to _do _anymore._

_I don't know i don't Know i dON't know I don't know..._

_...sorry. Never mind._

_I'll write in you later, I guess. Papa's calling me down to eat._

_— Anna._

:.

Dinner that night is ridiculously tense, and part of this is her own doing.

Subconsciously, of course, because no one can actively _see_ the decision that she's decided to make. Anna, for the time being, ends up calling this very blonde and very perfect replica of Elsa "Elsa Version Two," or maybe "Elsa Number Two" (any variation of the aforementioned names, really, because Anna can't quite yet wrap her head around calling this blonde woman _Elsa,_ plain and simple).

Elsa Version Two will not speak, and she probably won't for the remainder of the time she's at the table. Even through a bulging mouthful of mashed potato ("Anna," Mama sighs with a tinge of resigned exasperation, "please don't stuff your mouth with as much food again...") and flickering, slightly narrowed teal eyes, her new, reborn, _numéro de version deux_..."sister" is as stiff as Anna has ever seen her.

Which is saying a lot, considering the fact that Anna doesn't think that Elsa Version Two can actually sit without looking as if a plank of wood had been superglued to her spinal cord if she tried.

It appears that this fact has not escaped her father, either. Papa is throwing not-quite-furtive glances over his heaping forkful of meatloaf and starchy white potatoes to Elsa Version Two, blue eyes glinting with apprehension. There's an air about him, the one of an anxious, hovering parent, wanting to exude a comforting presence but in reality only making things a hell of a lot more awkward.

Elsa, for her part, is turning her food around her plate without much interest, in fact...looking rather squeamish. Anna's eyebrows meet together at the bridge of her nose in bewilderment even as she chews through her own food, accusing teal eyes trained onto Other Elsa's fork, which is currently squishing a shallow path through the mounds of potato on her plate, like a small figure treading through mountainous drifts of ice and snow.

Mama isn't having any of it. She has barely touched her own plate of food herself, green eyes tight with anger and irritation, all of the roiling ire contained within their mistrustful depths directed toward the unfocused platinum blonde sitting half-folded over herself at her place at the dinner table.

_"So."_

Anna pauses chewing on her food for a moment, expecting angry belligerence to come flying out of Mama's mouth yet still pausing to let the full fury behind the word sink in, before scooting an imperceptible inch back.

"How was your day at the company, Agdar?"

The abrupt start to the conversation is as stilted as Anna has ever heard, snapped unwillingly into existence on the mere whim of a frustrated woman.

_Just...Agdar, _Anna notices, before spearing her fork into a hefty chunk of steak. _Not Papa and Elsa. ...Elsa Number Two. Just Papa._

"It was fine," Papa says after too long a pause, too long for his response to be taken as unequivocally true. The only sound preventing the air from becoming dead and tautly silent in those few crucial moments had been the loud and obnoxious clink of Anna's silverware rattling on her plate. "Fine," he says again after again after a long pause, unconvincingly, before letting his eyes drop down back to his food.

Mama looks supremely unimpressed, then turns her ireful gaze onto Elsa Number Two, who flinches and immediately fumbles with her fork, consequently dropping it with a loud _clatter_ onto the ground. Papa visibly flinches at the sudden sound, throwing a furtive glance toward the blonde, an unidentifiable expression in his gaze.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," is already flying out of Elsa Number Two's mouth in a jumbled mess, tongue tripping over her words, a mask of quiet distress flitting across her face. It would have probably gone unnoticed by Anna if Elsa Number Two isn't so damn _expressionless _all the time, that even when the barest hint of emotion shivers into existence across her pale features, it shines out as bright as the summer sun. The platinum blonde, withering slightly under Mama's rapidly intensifying glare (Papa is studiously avoiding looking at either of them, instead choosing to robotically spoon his food into his mouth), quickly ducks under the table to retrieve the silver utensil.

"And how did you think it went?" Mama immediately asks as soon as Elsa Number Two's pale blonde head bobs back into view again, carefully setting the fork on her plate (which is still full of food), her gaze full of sharp animosity.

While her face and voice both remain as bland as ever (as it always is with her, of course), the response that Elsa Version Two gives is certainly not any more convincing than the one Papa had uttered a few minutes earlier.

"...It was okay...it was okay. Though quite — revealing."

Papa is looking distinctly uncomfortable now. His fork clanks loud and clear against his plate as his hand jerks.

_...Okay, so,_ Anna thinks, a wave of nausea inexplicably washing over her. _What happened there?_

The tension level in the room skyrockets from ten thousand to infinity. Papa looks as if he has just eaten something sour and Elsa Version Two has suddenly become fixated on her (still full) dinner plate.

Anna, for her part, blinks from her stony-faced mother to the clearly uncomfortable pair sitting opposite of her, then grimaces and surreptitiously scoots away from the table, placing her fork onto her nearly empty plate. She can't help but feel as if she's not sitting at a dinner table but rather an interrogator's, with both Papa and Elsa Number Two acting like silent, kicked puppies as Mama made increasingly stilted conversation that bordered upon ridiculous one-sided demands and thinly veiled discontent.

"I'm, um, finished," the redhead announces abruptly, the scrape of her chair rubbing against the ground sounding like a cannon shot tearing through the otherwise taut silence hovering around the area. "May I be excused?"

Elsa Version Two's eyes immediately snap to her own, unwavering and intense, and Anna immediately looks down, chomping down hard on her lower lip.

Because she can't bear to look at those cobalt blue irises right now. Not when Elsa, _her_ Elsa, has been fresh on her mind for the past two hours, her already tumultuous feelings only pulled to the breaking point by Mama's acidulous words. She can't describe _why,_ exactly, but it always comes full circle around to Elsa, Elsa, _Elsa._ Like some festering sore, a tough and gnarled knot of hurt and loss still chafing against her heart after all these years. One that she's managed to suppress, but in the light of all the _things_ that are happening, they've been newly brought to the surface and are rioting harder than they ever had before.

"You're excused." Mama nods at her, her movements yet still jerky and stiff. Anna, still gnawing furiously on her now-swollen lower lip, all but bolts from the dinner table, shoving her chair out of the way with a loud screeching noise as its feet rubbed abrasively against the ground. She takes the steps two at a time to her room, hands blindly groping for the door and clicking it shut behind her.

Anna collapses on her bed and hugs the dog-eared, ratty journal she had been scribbling in earlier close to her chest, hugging it there, as if she could just pour out all her woes and worries into scratchy lines of pencil marks (formed into letters, formed into words then sentences and then broken wishes) upon curling, thin sheets of lined paper and then watch them fly away. Anna sometimes feels as if she's been split down the middle, one part of her clinging stubbornly onto the pieces of a broken history and the other yanking her to look more toward the future.

And life is harsh and unfair in the present while death comes back to haunt her from the past with its ghosts.

(Life and death both come in the form of reanimated icy blue eyes and dull turned glossy platinum blonde locks of hair.)

:.

Agdar is languidly working away at a blueberry muffin and his third cup of black coffee — both of which are doing little if nothing to peel away the haggard, worried dark circles that are ringing the underside of his eyes — when Belle decides to pop in and pay him a visit, perfectly polished and dressed in a neatly pressed pencil skirt, dark gray blazer, and high heels that sink deeply into the carpeted floor of Agdar's office.

"Doctor Arendelle?"

The man in question gives a noncommittal grunt and picks another bite off of his muffin before popping it into his waiting mouth. "Hmm? What is it?"

Belle eyes him for a moment, warm brown eyes sweeping past his hallowed cheeks, the sharp relief of his joints, and scraggly blond facial hair that he hadn't bothered to shave away for the past five days.

"You look tired," she unhelpfully comments, setting down the bulging manila file folder that had been tucked underneath her arm onto Agdar's great oaken desk before snagging a chair and sitting herself down unceremoniously onto it. In a rare breach of maintaining her normally uptight and professional demeanor, she crosses her arms onto the desk before setting her chin down onto her hands, calmly observing her exhausted head of department.

"Do you think so?" he murmurs, tipping the lip of his coffee mug against his lips and gulping the bitter dark liquid in a fruitless attempt to acquire that energetic buzz caffeine usually lent to him.

"Er...I'd have been blind not to notice. Everyone's getting a little worried about you, Agdar." The use of his name indicates Belle's seriousness, despite the light-hearted tone she is currently employing.

"Well, I'm _fine."_

"You've showed up at the lab appearing progressively worse and worse as the week has worn on," Belle patiently says, eying his unkempt mop of hair and crumpled suit. "Even your work is being affected; you accidentally gave a copy of that splicing report to me instead of Anastasia just two days ago. _And_ you've been acting gruffer toward everyone more than usual."

"I'm fine," Agdar insists again, and then blinks. The retort had come out with more of a snappish tone than he had intended for it to.

"No, you aren't." Belle pushes aside the fat stack of papers she had placed upon his table a few minutes earlier (Agdar had clumsily snatched at it) and stops him with a stern stare. "What is going on?"

_"I am your _superior!" Agdar blusters after a long moment. _"I will not have you talking to me about such an intimate matter!"_

"...Subject Twenty is mad at me," is what comes out of his mouth instead, and for all he's worth, he sounds like a pouty little child who had just been caught mauling the sad blue crayon he held clutched tightly in his possession.

Belle's eyebrows really do disappear into her hairline this time. "...Don't you mean Elsa?" she asks sharply, her expression contorting into one of surprise. "Oh, Agdar, don't tell me you've taken to calling her 'Subject Twenty'..."

"She was the twentieth clone of Elsa that we produced," he gruffly says in response before downing the last dregs of his lukewarm coffee. "Therefore? — Subject Twenty."

"Well," the brunette says with still a bit of harshness seeping through her tone, and by all accounts she seems like a mother chiding her sulking child at the moment, "maybe that's part of the reason why she's..._mad_ at you? You're not even using her given _name."_

_If she's even wholly aware of it,_ the blond bitterly thinks, staring vacantly at the thin brown liquid that coats the bottom of his beige-colored coffee mug.

"She calls me 'Father' now, but I can practically see her thinking 'Creator,'" Agdar admits after a few heavy moments, his words balling themselves up into wads of stiff white paper before they fall quite blankly, quite quietly to the floor. "And...and she found out about the room. With the other...tests. Clones."

Belle seems quizzical as she processes the information, brown eyes flickering with understanding as soon as Agdar voices the part about Elsa discovering the other nineteen versions of herself in the lab. Agdar could see the worry and empathy flit over her gaze, mind probably trying to comprehend how it must have felt for the demure platinum blonde to have walked into a chamber where there was nothing but flickering opalescent white lights and floor-to-ceiling vats inhabited by dormant failures.

"I see," she says after a long while. "Well, I suppose...that Elsa just needs time." Shrugging uncomfortably, "Seeing such a spectacle as that would be hard for anyone to soak in. Especially a person who has just been brought into this world. Already grown, yet almost with the mind of a child."

"She has matured very quickly," deflects Agdar, his words thrown out spastic and clipped.

"I never said she didn't," says Belle. There's a testy undertone running through her voice now. "In any case, you probably need to give her space until she manages to come to terms with what she saw. Don't hover around and make everyone feel all uncomfortable like you're liable to do when _you_ don't even know what to do."

Coming from his senior anesthetics department leader, Agdar is honestly feeling more and more chastened by the moment. "Er...I do that?" he asks, very unprofessionally before slumping down into his chair, peering at Belle through the corners of his eyes as if scared to confront her directly.

"This is coming from a person who's worked with you for pretty much her entire career," comes the weary response, though Agdar thinks he can detect a faint shadow of amusement underneath Belle's words. "I think that I should have at least picked up upon _some_ of your idiosyncrasies."

"Hmm." Agdar eyes the anesthesiologist, then allows his lips to quirk upward slightly. "I suppose you would have...now," his tone reverting back to its normal crispness, "what is in that folder that you are keeping from me?"

"Oh — oh, yes, Doctor." Belle sheepishly smiles and gently removes the morbidly obese folder from where it had been tucked snugly into the crook of her arm, placing it onto the desk. "Your January journal article came back from the _Science _revision board," she explains, "They wanted a bit more detail in the abstract and for you to clean up the procedure and that section on, what was it, moderated cell apoptosis, I believe? But other than those few small snags, they say it's ready for publication."

"Good, good," Agdar agrees somewhat absentmindedly, flipping through the pages. "Anything else?"

"Er...yes, actually," says Belle after a pause. She riffs through the sheets in the folder, peeling them from under Agdar's fingers until she reaches one of the pages near the back end of the entire monstrous stack, tugging it gently out before showing it to the geneticist in front of her.

"The IGC's acceptance letter arrived. For your speech..." She hesitates for a moment. "About your breakthrough with human cloning. And, um, they requested Elsa's presence."

"As to be expected," Agdar sighs, kneading his fingertips into his temples. "And...quite frankly, if I want to present my research, I will probably have to take Elsa along, anyway."

To be honest, he hadn't expected any less out of the President of the whole International Genetics Conference — Adolf "Duke" Weselton of the _Institut fuer Zellbiologie _in Germany. Weselton was quite infamous for both his ever-flapping toupée (not that the man himself ever noticed it), short stature, and his even shorter temper. Agdar is almost positive that the German man had gone slightly out of his mind as he aged quickly into his seventies, growing increasingly eccentric (he had once sprouted the memorable phrase "I am a chicken with the face of a monkey" during a project debut in Amsterdam).

Belle looks at him strangely for this, and he can't quite fathom why; nor does she explain her thinking. Instead, she gives a brief up-and-down shrug of her shoulders before rising to her feet, rearranging the sleeves of her blazer.

"Well, that's about all I've got to say," she says, her hands dropping to her sides. "Do you require anything else, Doctor?"

"...No," Agdar says after a few moments of thought. "Thank you for bringing this up with me, Belle. You are dismissed."

Belle nods and turns around, striding across the office to leave.

Agdar stares after her retreating back, a queer look brushing lightly over his face like a passing shadow, the edge of a storm.

_("I don't care what you do, Agdar. But you're going to find a way to get rid of this — this literal_ rape_ of our daughter's memory, this thing,__ it, or_ I_ will. Otherwise, consider our marriage _finished.")

Because why, out of all times, is his wife's words coming back to him now?

_I...I need reassurance. To know that I did the right thing._

"Ah...Belle?" he asks suddenly, calling for one of his most trusted confidants at the workplace.

The brunette turns from the mouth of the door, inquisitive. "Yes?"

"Do you consider Subj...erm, _Elsa..._a person? As in a human being?"

This question certainly stops Belle in her tracks, something unidentifiable bursting into existence in her brown eyes. The look she gives him then is strange, pitying and reproachful at the same time.

"Why do you ask such a question?" Her answer is guarded, that penetrative, piercing look still trained upon him, unblinking and still as stone.

"I merely want to know your opinion," Agdar says, clutching tightly onto the IGC paperwork as if the folder is the sole lifeline connecting his earthly tether to life.

_I want to know because Anna and Elsa are not _connecting_ like they should be and Anna had always been so good with _people._ Because my own wife thinks that this new Elsa is no better fit than to fraternize with the dirtiest scum of the earth, much less her _only_ living daughter. Because _I _don't know what to think anymore and am starting to wonder whether bringing my little girl back into the world in a body no one knows _— not even herself _—__ was the right choice to make._

"Well...I'm not going to get into all the ethical dilemmas, nor the religious ones, but...she can talk," Belle softly replies after another long pause that seems to stretch past the age of the universe itself. "She may have been grown in a laboratory, artificially, but you know what? If you had just _looked _at her, no context given beforehand, you wouldn't be able to tell that she is a clone of another human being. Though that was our ultimate goal, was it not?

"She still looks like a human. She walks like a human, she acts like a human, and perhaps most importantly, she at least has boundless potential to _emote_ like a human." The last part is clipped short, brusque and voiced as if it's a pointed accusation. "She feels, Agdar. Or at least, she's trying to feel. I see it every time you bring her here for those physical check-ups. Maybe she doesn't smile all that often, but when she does, I can tell that it reaches her eyes, however remotely. It really does." Her voice turns softer. "She...Elsa's still trying to figure out who she is, Agdar. Aren't we all at her age? She was _just_ brought into this world a scant few weeks ago; of course she isn't going to pick up on all the subtle quirks there are to living in our society. But that shouldn't even matter: do you consider a little baby, born through natural means by the fertilization of an egg in a mother's womb by a sperm from a father, any less human because they do not pick on human _mannerisms_ as soon as they are born? _Je ne crois pas. _I think not. So what legitimate reason could I possibly have to believe that this clone of your own _daughter_, Elsa, is a creature lesser than a human being than the rest of us are?"

She gives him a long look, which he averts his eyes from, before striding out into the hallway in a swish of dark fabric, not even giving Agdar a chance to respond.

The door closes with a small _schnick_ behind her.

:.

_December 31, 2091_

_Happy new year...kinda. Well Happy New Year's Eve. didn't have time to write in you for a while. and **scribblescribble** well, hah let me tell you, it was one of the worst I've ever had. Papa wasn't even downstairs watching the feed from Times Square with me and he was up with Elsa Version Two the whole night. Not that I'm complaining or anything, because god knows that Elsa Number Two could use some company if she's still being all shy around everything else. and Mama is still very angry that he's paying so much attention to...well, you know, Elsa Version Two; like according to her, "she who must not be named." I'm probably not even going to get to watch the ball drop on TV in Times Square without her grumbling under her breath every five seconds. Like, can you just _let it go?_ at least on New Year's? it's, like, supposed to be a time for celebration! ugh._

_Like...meh OK. I...understand where she's coming from, I really do. lately she's been trying to talk to me about Elsa, you know? "She's not your real sister, I hope you remember that" and similar crap like that. I don't rea**scribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribble**_

_But ok. I can handle it. And...her mentality is, well, it's not really my attitude anymore._

_...Actually I don't know. (Again.) But I know, I know I've definitely been kind of unfair to **scribble** her. Elsa clone, I mean. Like...I'm still super angry. Kind of. Somewhere. But...I mean, **scribble** she didn't _ask_ to exi**scribblescribble**_

_That sounded really bad. It sounded a lot better coming out of my mouth at like two in the morning. But...ugh I don't know! I can't put it into words. What I mean to say is...this Elsa clone didn't mean for itse**scribble** herself to be...you know brought into exsitence and whatever. Like **scribble** she had no choice in the matter! And, well, I don't see why she shouldn't be treated as any less or any more than the rest of us. She's just...kinda, sort of like Elsa, you know? So what if she was born in a test tube?_

_But I'm not angry at Papa either. I — _okay, _I'm angry, but I'm not as angry as him as I am with this Elsa clone. Which doesn't really make any sense. Maybe I'm just**scribblescribblescribble** no OK. Just. Maybe I just want to use Elsa's clone as a scapegoat. Because it's just, just all so _sudden._ Like one day Elsa's dead, and the next, on my _birthday,_ on the fucking _anniversery_ day of her death, she's _alive_ but she's _not._ She's here, her _physical manisfestation_ is like here, but...not her personality. Not _her. _And that's what I miss._

_But that's also the thing, that's what can never be replaced. Never. And it hurts me so fucking much._

_This Elsa clone is a different person, being, thing **scribblescribble**_ _good lord oh my god i don't care whatever the _hell_ you want to call it she's somthing different trapped inside my sister's body that just blows my mind. becuse she looks like Elsa, but she's _NOT_ Elsa. She can _**never**_ be Elsa and part of me thinks who the _fuck_ does she think she is tryng to be elsa when she's clearly _not_ and will never _be_ her?! argh! and to think that papa ever thought that just by _recreating _elsa's body can compensate for _her?! _i don't.._

**_scribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribble_**_HAT E**scribblescribblescribblescribblescribblescribble** and if he even _does_ th**scribblescribble**nt_ my_ Elsa ba**scribblescribblescribblescribbescribblescribblescribblescribblescribble**_

_never mind. still not talking to her NOW, anyway. but...I...part of me thinks that I should still try and reach out to her. Maybe I'm being too harsh or something. I mean it's not like it's her fault that Elsa died._

_Just not now. I'm really pissed._

_(A REALLY ANGRY) Anna_

-—

**part the second** :: property

For a holiday that is supposed to celebrate the passing of the new year into the old, New Year's Eve, as Elsa has learned it is called, is a terribly apathetic and dull affair.

"It's a time for happiness and new beginnings," Anna had said rather flatly when Elsa inquired of the traditions of this particular holiday. "Like, you know. Resolutions and stuff like that."

_No, I actually don't know,_ Elsa refrained herself from saying, but she had quietly thanked Anna anyway, leaving the strawberry blonde to what appeared to be a mess of incomplete biology homework, and retreated to her own room, mind still abuzz and trying to figure out _some_ way to get the redhead to treat her without thinly concealed hostility and apathy in general.

_What do I have to do, cry as if my heart has just gotten torn out?_ she finds herself thinking at one point, stretched across her baby blue comforter even as she gazes listlessly at the smooth, painted white ceiling of the room she sleeps in.

Well, her bedroom. _Hers._ The concept is still novel to her, the idea of owning something. How can she own anything when she doesn't even really own her own life?

_(Lucky.)_

"Your bedroom," the Creator had told her with conviction strong in his tone perhaps six days ago. There had been almost something...desperate and pleading visible in his eyes. It was too visceral for her to deduce properly; Elsa can't quite identify it. She's still not quite in tune with the plethora of _emotions_ humans always seem to express, but she can tell that he's still trying to make up for what she had seen back in the lab. "It's yours, alright? Don't let anyone else think otherwise."

_(You could have been _any_ one of those mutant experiments you saw.)_

Elsa hadn't answered him: she hadn't even glanced at him after a brief, upward peek at his expression. She had still been hung up over the images of the nineteen other pale bodies floating quietly, calmly, in their vats of sloshing...whatever that liquid had been.

_(You could have been just another accident.)_

And honestly, she still _is._ Still has nightmares almost every single night, trapped in a lair full of deformed, mutant bodies who look _exactly like her,_ pressing in closer and closer in tidal waves of shuffling, oppressive bodies and clammy white skin. And Elsa would be absolute stunned in those dreams: unable to move, rooted to the ground by invisible fetters fashioned out of fear and terror.

_(You could have been forgotten about and left to rot your days out inside a metal vat.)_

The breaking of her reverie comes in the form of a knock on her door and the sound of the last voice in the world she wants to hear.

"Elsa?"

_(Living through this forsaken life as if it is one giant, goddamned lie.)_

Her hands fist into her bed covers even at the sound, and Elsa forces herself to look up at the white-painted slab of wood before taking in a shaky breath.

"Yes?"

He looks slightly uncomfortable, fingers interlocking themselves tightly with one another before he nods toward her, a mite uncertainly. "May I sit?"

He's acting oddly formal. Elsa wonders for a moment why the Creator is asking for permission to sit in his own house, but hesitantly nods a few moments of deliberation later, scooting over a few inches to the side to allow him to settle down on the mattress next to her.

"Um...is there something you want to ask me?" she asks, looking down at her lap, yet unwilling to confront the Creator full on in the eyes.

She wants nothing more than for him to leave.

_(Fading away into nothing more than a bad memory.)_

"Well...yes, actually," the Creator says after a long and uncomfortable pause. There is a tinge of awkwardness curling at the edges of his tone now. "I...there is an event coming up in a few days from now, Elsa, called the IGC: the International Genetics Conference. It's an event that occurs biannually in January which aims to reflect on progress made in genetics, to celebrate the best of contemporary research and to anticipate future developments in the discipline."

Elsa waits.

"I have been asked to present at this year's IGC," the Creator says quietly, "and I would like you to attend the conference with me."

_(Defined as an error, regarded as a number.)_

The words hit her like a heavy bulldozer crashing through her chest, leaving a gaping, bloody hole in the place where her heart should be.

Foremost among all her questions is, _Why?_

What comes out of her mouth is, "You...you want me to come with you to this 'International Genetics Conference'?"

Her words sound as if they are coming from far away, even to her. Something playing in perhaps an old cinema theater, being blared through tinny speakers, detached and free-floating through the air.

_(Scorned as something less. Than. Fucking. Human.)_

"Please, _Elsa._ It would mean a lot," the Creator begs, clasping her left hand between both of his own in a gesture of what is probably meant to be a plead for apology. Elsa, though, only bites down hard on her lip and looks away, trying in vain to keep that hot, prickling feeling in her eyes from spilling out and down her cheeks.

"Just...just this once, okay?" comes his soft voice once more.

She does not reply, though her right fingers curl slightly in vexation from where they are lying on the soft, downy mattress.

_So this is sadness?_ she dazedly thinks, averting her gaze toward the blank ceiling of the bedroom. _I appear to be about to shed tears, it seems, and isn't that an expression of sadness? Or__ is it anger? Or is it frustration?_

Her hand is still being warmed between the Creator's own, reminding her of his presence. Solid and there and immovable.

_(Born to fulfill the whims of others, all of their artificial caprices.)_

"I...I will go."

She doesn't know what compels her to say this. She doesn't know why she wants to go to this...this _International Genetics Conference_ and be shown off like an award-winning horse, no doubt.

Maybe she doesn't want to go, yet she still feels a strange _duty_ to do so. She has no wish to antagonize the only human being who appears to at least tolerate her in his life, be it a ploy or not.

But she _has_ to know. She _has_ to know...

"I will go...on the condition that you tell me the reason...why you kept the knowledge of those other clones from me," she finally says, her voice cracking. The words fall to the ground like shards of broken glass.

_(But doomed to remain forever as a failure.)_

The Creator flinches visibly away from her as if she is brandishing a burning tree branch in front of his face, but then calms himself and turns back.

"...I'll tell you what," he says quietly. "Come with me on this trip, and I will tell you the whole story of your birth...your origin...your intended purpose...during the plane ride."

_(Just a scrap item to be used.)_

"Okay," Elsa feels her mouth move once more, and the word feels like dry cardboard in her mouth. She slips her hand as gently as possible from his own.

"Okay," she says again.

"Thank you," the Creator responds, a small smile breaking across his features.

He closes the door gently behind him.

Elsa buries her face in her pillow and feels all of it — the sadness and anger and frustration — finally beginning to leak out, staining her pillow with darkness and other, unspoken questions that are probably best left without answers.

_(Then thrown away like trash when its usefulness has been exhausted.)_

:.

Hans has twelve brothers — three biological, nine adopted — and it is by some unfortunate, unspoken rule of the universe that all of them happen to be older than he is. Needless to say, he has endured quite a bit of suffering at their hands, whether they be petty, childish pranks or more serious ones that had his mother grounding Erik, his oldest brother (pushing on thirty now, though he had been ten when he slopped two great fistfuls of mud into Hans's face), for two weeks.

Although Felix had never went out of his way to take advantage of Hans like that, and he was the only one of all of his twelve brothers who ever even paid attention to him.

He was the oldest of all of Hans's adopted brothers, and the first time Hans had seen him was at nine. He can still remember that day as clearly as a bright summer sun shines.

Mother had come bursting in through the garage door, many wispy strands of her dark brown hair somehow having gone kamikaze and all over the place (they were just totally spilling out of her already-messy bun like a waterfall of keratin), her green eyes shining with unadulterated joy, before announcing something along the lines that she expected to see the entire Westerguard household down in the kitchen within the next two minutes, else no one would be getting her famous æblekage— kind of like apple pie in a cup, but infinitely better — for dessert come dinnertime.

Hans was (and still is) of the opinion that the only reason the sound of feet had begun to hammer themselves down the winding staircase was not because his brothers had any interest in this "surprise" that Mother had brought, but rather because no one wanted to be deprived of that sweet apple charlotte after supper. Joanne Westerguard had always been an excellent cook, whipping up sumptuous meals for all six rowdy members of the family: her husband (though Elias was rarely ever home), and of course, all five of her sons (at the time), adopted or not. The threat of getting none of her world-class dessert for the night had obviously been enough to send everyone currently within the household to come stampeding downstairs.

"Come on and meet your new brother!" she announced brightly in her classic manner, throwing her arms out and tightly hugging a rather gangly, dark-haired boy with glasses who had cautiously stepped into view.

No one had really taken a particular shine to the quiet boy: of course, they had all greeted Felix alright, but drifted off soon afterward. Mother had to bustle into the kitchen to begin making dinner, until Felix and Hans — who had hung back from introducing himself — were the only ones left in the living room, standing there rather awkwardly and trying not to stare at each other.

"So...hi!"

Hans had started, not really expecting to be addressed in such a cheerful manner. Of course, he should have offered the first greeting — it was a sign of power, after all, and perhaps by putting this new brother beneath him, his other, older brothers wouldn't tease him quite so mercilessly.

Instead, he had blurted out in a rather squeaky, nine-year-old voice, "Oh — hi...me?"

"Yep!" Felix glanced around. "'Cause I mean, like, who else would I be talking to?"

Hans didn't know much about where Felix came from, but he had lived through enough of the introductions of new brothers his mother had taken in to know that they generally came from somewhere called a foster home, or maybe an orphanage.

"Well, _you_ don't have any parents," said Hans instead in a horribly superior tone of voice, attempting to exude his child-like authority. "But you're still really happy, which makes me confused. You don't have any parents and that's why Mom took you in _now _but you're still happy. Why?"

Felix, surprisingly, had merely shrugged, seemingly unperturbed. Though looking back on it, there had to be _something_ buried within his dark eyes, something he covered up with layers of denial and that peppy confidence and easygoing nature he had always retained.

_"Well,_ the thing is, I've never known my biological parents," Felix said, softly. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, continuing, "I only remember that I grew up under Nani's care, for as long as I can think back. And she was really nice. It was with Wendy and Peter and James and everyone. It was nice there, but it's even nicer to have a family now who's adopted me." The sincere smile broke across his features once more, clear as the summer rain. "I don't think I know your name, though. So your name is...?"

"Hans!" Hans blurted out, crossing his arms with his lower lip stuck out in a peeved pout. "My name's Hans!"

"Alright, let's start over," Felix agreed amicably, skipping toward him and holding out his hand, still smiling widely. His eyes sparkled with something joyous. "Nice to meetcha, Hans. I'm Felix."

That had been nine years ago.

Felix and Hans had developed quite the close bond over the years, having similar tastes in both academics or otherwise, and he was really like a true brother to Hans. (Well, more so than any of his biological siblings, at any rate.) Mother came to say that they were almost attached to the hip; wherever Felix was, Hans could be found trailing a short distance away, vibrant green eyes lit up with rare adoration.

Though when the time came for him to go to college, Felix left the Westerguard household when Hans was fifteen, headed off for the University of Heidelberg, all the way in Germany, although he had promised Hans he'd visit if he had the time.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Felix never did have that time, but he had sent Hans a somewhat cryptic letter around the beginning of summer, when Hans had just been finishing up his second to last year at Cambridge, telling the younger man in a letter practically vibrating in his hands from excitement conveyed through his words that he had been accepted as a researcher into the prestigious Fransokyo Laboratories.

So when Felix had popped back from the lab at where he worked for a visit to the Westerguard household for Jul that very same year, swooping in and giving a beaming Joanne quick pecks on both sides of her cheeks, Hans had sprang from where he was reading a book in the living room and had made a beeline straight for Felix, whose dark chocolate eyes had been lighting up in excitement. He clapped Hans on the back, grinning widely.

"Hey there, little brother!" he had exclaimed brightly before crushing the younger auburn-haired man into a tight one-armed hug. "You miss me?"

Despite himself, Hans allowed a smile to crack across his carefully controlled expression. "It's great to see you again, Felix," he agreed lightly, hugging his beaming brother back. "And of course I missed you...do you even need to ask?"

"Just making sure, little brother," Felix smirked back, his voice jovial and teasing. "But — by the gods, Hans, you've changed quite a bit! Even cut your hair, didn't you? Mother finally convince you to do that? _And_ you're finishing up your third year of undergrad at university, yeah?"

"You can say that," said Hans ruefully, ruffling his now respectably shortened hair. "And, yeah. Cambridge University, actually. Biochem major, with...a specialization in stem cell research. I got into an exchange program."

"Ha! Oh, yeah, I heard about that all from Mother! She was gushing over the phone, let me tell you. _Gushing."_ Felix grinned, then led a flushing Hans (who remembered _very _well how he had been tackled with a bear hug that had instantly driven every square inch of breath out of his lungs as soon as he had come home for summer break from the local university he had previously been attending) down the hall to the living room, which was all set and decorated for the holidays, draped with garlands of festive lights. "And actually, I was hoping that you'd say that."

"...Say what?" asked Hans, a mite surprised.

"The stem cell thing. Research. Ah, whatchamacallit." The dark-haired man flopped down onto a black leather rolling chair before pushing his slightly askew black glasses up the bridge of his nose, arms hanging lazily off the sides of the armrests and legs sprawled apart in a rather undignified manner. With anyone else, Hans probably would have been scandalized to see act in such a way, but he was too used to Felix's mannerisms to even so much as bat an eye.

"You know the place I work at? Fransokyo Laboratories?" Felix asked, still smiling broadly. "With Tadashi Hamada's team?"

Fransokyo Laboratories, Hans had definitely heard of, but not the following name. Tadashi Hamada, that was.

When Hans had looked at him blankly, Felix rolled his eyes and let out a melodramatic sigh.

"Aw, c'mon, Hans! If you're going to go into stem cell research, you've _gotta_ know who that guy is. Tadashi Hamada, I mean. He's literally a _genius_. And so is his little brother. Hiro or something, so I've heard. But like, Tadashi was the one a couple months ago finally managed to induce stem cells to replicate into neurons without the body rejecting them flat-out? Also found a more efficient way to get stem cells to replicate in general. For organ replacement. I mean, of course there are still a few kinks that've gotta be worked out, but that doesn't make him any less of a genius."

Hans remembered, vaguely, something that had been mentioned about Tadashi Hamada during one of his day lectures, though he had also remembered dozing through that particular class, thanks to the two hours of sleep he had been running on. "Well, yeah. I guess. Maybe."

"Okay, whatever. You'll probably meet him soon enough. And by that I mean that we've got a position open for an undergrad intern now. Maybe leading into grad, depending on how well you...or whatever person gets it...do."

Hans had immediately jumped onto Felix's offer, of course — after all, when would he ever get another opportunity like this? Getting to work side by side with one of the rising stars of his field, it was literally a dream come true.

Fortunately, Tadashi had taken a liking to him and accepted him into the lab straightaway, even giving him a quick rundown tour of the place. Hans had worked side by side with his brother at Fransokyo Laboratories ever since.

But all of this Hans broods over at one in the morning, still dressed in an impeccable work suit and hunched slightly over his small desk, the holograph device that's usually beaming a screen into the air noticeably turned off. His right fingers tap a staccato rhythm against the glossy maple wood, left hand curled into a loose fist.

And, well, if Felix wants Hans to help him with something — even if the task itself doesn't even need to be asked, nor voiced — there is no saying that the young, auburn-haired man wouldn't consider going to the ends of the earth to get it for him.

:.

Some time during an ungodly hour of the night — and much too tired and frazzled to glance at the clock — Anna is woken up by the sound of harsh shouts drifting up from the lower level, groggy eyes struggling to peel themselves open at the unwelcome intrusion of noise.

"...don't care _what_ you do...the literal_..._daughter's..."

"...reasonable, please, Idun..."

"..._sonable?! I can't even _believe_ you're telling..._reasonable..._of all times...!"_

Mama and Papa.

Lids now fully stretched open, revealing wide and confused teal orbs to the darkness of the night, Anna rubs furiously against her eyes and hastily stumbles out of bed, pulling the short sleeves of the thick black sweatshirt she sleeps in during the winter close to her frame, looking to conserve whatever body heat she could even as she cracked open her door a sliver. Peering out into the gloom outside, Anna pokes her head out a little further and catches a muted pool of golden light filtering out into the long hallway from the first floor. The strained, angry voices are clearly coming from down there as well._  
><em>

After a few moment's hesitation, Anna slithers out of her room through the thin crack she had created between her doorframe and the door itself, sucking her stomach in before slipping out into the hallway so as to make sure her door doesn't make an obnoxious creaking noise like it is liable to do. Her bare feet whisper softly upon the rich scarlet-colored cloth of a carpet. The strawberry blonde eventually makes it to the end of the hallway, near the barely-opened door of the study, her ears pricked for any other words that are bound to be shouted into the still night air.

And Anna _does_ hear more yelling — plenty of it, in fact — and honestly she can't believe that half of these words are pouring out of her parents' mouths. Her parents, who were both supposed to be the _rocks_ in her lives, anchors. Figures of authority, voices of reason. Not screaming little toddlers, fighting loudly with each other because one of them stole the other's toy train away from the other.

"I don't understand you, Idun," she hears Papa's voice: agitated, weary, and tired. "I _don't understand. _I'm trying, but I _don't. Understand._ Elsa is _back._ Our daughter is back, Idun, so why are you so _adverse_ to the idea of her being here?!"

"No. _No! _Don't you _dare,_ Agdar Arendelle! Never _her. _Always _it!"_ comes Mama's screamed retort. It's a tone of voice that Anna has never heard her use before, one laced with burning white-hot threads of undiluted hatred and fear, tinged with hysteria yet dipped with grief. "How can you even bear to _refer_ to that thing as...as our _daughter?_ That _thing_ is not human. That _thing _is a clone. An artificial one at that, grown in a test tube and woken on a medical stretcher. A genetically-engineered biological life form, birthed from the cells of another. That thing is nothing more than a carbon copy of a former life form, Agdar! It is _no__t_ our daughter, and I will never consider it as such. I _refuse._ It is not a _human _by any stretch of the word, and I will not have it referred to as such!"

"You're not seeing sense, Idun!" Papa's own voice is growing louder by the minute, and Anna flinches backward a few steps when she hears a loud bang echo throughout the kitchen, where a solid fist must have been slammed against the granite countertop by the looks of it. The sound reverberates through the lower floor, up the stairs and through the hallway and into Anna's ears, sending an uneasy shiver wracking her body in tight and short spasms. "Give me _one_ reason why _she_ 'isn't human.' Give me _one_ reason that classifies _her, Elsa,_ as a different species so much lower on the animal kingdom hierarchy than we are. Give me one reason why she deserves your scorn." There's a sound then, something that Anna attributes to a frustrated sigh. "You are being ridiculous."

"You want one reason, Agdar?" Mama's voice has suddenly turned soft, soft and conciliatory, but it's clear to Anna that she's still raging furious underneath the sheer veneer of calmness she has abruptly donned. "I'll give you two.

"This Elsa clone, this thing was not born of _love._ Not of love between a man and a woman — nor can it be said that this thing was raised by a man and a man, a woman and a woman; don't you dare give me that look — but grown in a lab. No parents. Not even fertilization. It's not _natural,_ Agdar. It's never been natural to take any creature living upon this planet and then create an exact, carbon copy of it inside a metal cavern that you call a lab, with no _nurturing_ and no _birth_ to speak of. How can it be human, brought into existence in that kind of environment? How can it have a human mind, a human heart, a human soul?

"And now you've given this _thing_ a fate that nothing, not a human nor an animal, would ever wish for. It's worse than nothing by this point. It was born to please, but it is doomed to fail. And there's nothing you nor I nor _anyone_ can possibly do about that."

_Born to please, but doomed to fail. _The words hang in the air like a guillotine and Anna winces at the _force_ behind them, the sheer dismissive attitude imbued within the sentence.

When he finally speaks, Papa's voice has turned impossibly cold, biting at the edges and freezing at its core.

"I see," he says flatly. "_'She wasn't created out of love,'_ you say. I suppose you mean to say that I spent over a decade of my research, agonizing over every single detail, every single imperfection, without love for what I was doing. Without love for _Anna,_ whom I decided to do all of this for in the first place. And I suppose that every single baby born from rape was brought into existence in the womb by _love."_

_Oookay...time to go now,_ Anna thinks to herself uncomfortably, starting to backpedaling wildly, because the conversation is really getting quite heated, and the word _rape_ simply shuts a part of her mind down. She'd _been_ uncomfortable with even its merest mention after one of her closest friends at school when she was in eleventh grade, Janine, had been sexually assaulted while waiting for Anna to pick her up from the dollar store she worked at.

And Anna doesn't like the idea, she really doesn't; she doesn't want to think about it, and while aware of it, there are simply things in the world she never wants to have to discuss, especially when applied to such a fragile situation as this one.

Her feet are moving quickly, stumbling and tripping over each other across the carpeted floor in her haste to get away from the blaring conversation, but when her back hits the partially open door to her study and Anna near tumbles onto the ground with a surprised shriek — she claps her hands over her mouth at the last possible second, tears of pain springing into her eyes as her elbow jabs into something rough and hard.

Another small squawk, certainly not born from her mouth, sounds from behind her. Anna does give a muffled yell this time, spinning around on her heel and collapsing into a ground in a tangled mess of red hair and flailing limbs before she heaves herself upward, squinting into the darkness._  
><em>

She turns wildly around, mouth hanging slightly open in fear, and then snaps her jaw shut when she sees the spectacle in front of her, wide and bared.

Because when Anna turns around, she sees light blonde hair and half-lidded blue eyes shining out from a darkened corner of the study at the end of the hallway. When she turns around, she sees folded arms and knees tucked tightly against a rapidly heaving chest. When she turns around, she sees the pair of blue eyes slip shut before squeezing tightly against each other, teeth bared in a soundless wail that tears through Anna's heart yet as if it's made of tissue paper.

When she turns around, all she sees is _Elsa_ crying. _Elsa_ sobbing. _Elsa_ feeling.

Not "Elsa Number Two." Not "clone." Not "it," nor "that thing." Not even "fake sister" or "sister" in general.

Elsa doesn't look up when Anna steps into the study, though whether this is because the platinum blonde doesn't care or she just hasn't noticed, Anna doesn't know.

But she wraps her arms around Elsa anyway, and Elsa doesn't question it, only leans in further to Anna's offered embrace without comment. She turns her head into the crook of Anna's shoulder and cries.

Something touches Anna's heart then. Not _really,_ of course, but she can feel a burst of warmth — pity and protectiveness mixed into one cocktail of sudden _care_ that washes through her system, shooting through her veins to her very fingertips. Care for the blonde she has her arms tightly wrapped around at this moment. Care for _Elsa._

"...Uh," Anna says quietly and slowly, the words streaming out of her mouth prompted by Elsa's fingers tightly squeezing into the flesh of her forearm. "I just...wanted to say...I know that you didn't ask to be brought into this world. You...didn't ask for any of it. And, uh, I know that's obvious, but —" Anna takes a shaky breath while Elsa only sobs harder, pressing her face even deeper into the redhead's sweatshirt. "I...I'm really, _truly_ sorry for the way I treated you over these past few weeks. I'm so sorry. You...deserve to be seen as someone of value, because...I guess you _are." _Biting her lip, she forces herself to continue past Elsa's chokes. "Oh, god, please...don't...don't listen to Mom, she's just being stupid. Really stupid. Like a bitch, kind of. Um. Not that I hate her or anything. I love her, but..." Anna shakes her head. "Never mind. And, heh, I've been kinda stupid too, if I say so myself. Okay, really stupid...

"Anyway, I just wanted to say...if you're even listening to me right now...I care, yeah? And I'm sure that Dad cares too, by the way he and Mom are battling it out down there. But, just...there are people out there who care. People out there who don't think you're sub-human, or something stupid like that. And there will also be people who don't want you around — I think you already know that — but please, I just want you to know...despite the way I've been acting toward you, which I really apologize for...that I am _not_ one of them, for all it's worth. Okay...Elsa?"

It's the first time she's said out loud the platinum blonde's given name. _Elsa._ By it's own, simple and clean. No "Elsa Number Two" or "Elsa Version Two" attached. No "fake sister" or "sister-clone" or "thing" or "it." No thoughts of association _with_ Anna's dead _(dead) _sister, either. Untainted and free.

Elsa. It resonates quietly out in sound waves arcing past her lips, through the air and into the room. Remnants of the name trickles down her throat, into her heart and carried through her body into waves that physically manifest into a tighter squeeze of her arms around the shuddering girl clutching onto her.

She doesn't really say anything after that, though this is mainly due to the fact that she doesn't know _what_ do say without repeating herself.

But she knows she's gotten through to some part of Elsa — pierced through some chink in an armor coat fashioned out of devastation — when she feels the blonde's lips move against her shoulder, forming two syllables, one word.

"Okay," whispers Elsa, and it's hoarse and quiet and intermixed with her quiet, heaving sobs. The enunciation and stressed sounds are garbled and clipped jaggedly, hesitant, then shot through with leaden bullets trailing a rainstorm of tears.

But Anna seizes the word and grabs onto it as if she's seeing the rising sun after living under the shroud of ten thousand years of darkness. She holds onto it and she hopes for..._something._ Something she doesn't quite know yet, and doesn't know what the something really is, but she still hopes for it.

She can hear the creak of the steps, of heavy feet thudding up the staircase. Anna assumes that Mama and Papa have stopped their dispute (for the time being) and are heading up to bed. But they don't check on either her or Elsa, and apparently head immediately into their room. For this, Anna is grateful, because after getting the general gist of that argument, she doesn't know how either of her parents would react to Elsa crying (expressing raw and untethered emotion for the first time _ever_) and Anna hugging her and two hair-breadths away from crying herself.

_Born to please, but doomed to fail._

But eventually, as everything does, all turns still. The creaking of bedsprings fades away into silence, brief rustles of wind outside taper off into nothing, until all Anna can hear is Elsa's breathing, feel Elsa's thrumming pulse, Elsa _everything._

They stay like that into the rosy. peach-colored stretches of dawn. And maybe, maybe even longer than that, but Anna wouldn't know now.

By that time, she's fallen asleep.

* * *

><p><em>spelling errors are deliberate.<em>

_regarding the lateness of the update: i agonized over this chapter like there was no tomorrow__,__ and __i've been dealing with a lot of stress and feeling somewhat depressed lately. _artifice_, like it or not, is contributing toward that. well, to the stress, at least. i really do apologize if updates are slow, but know that i will never abandon this. i will always try and write for it, even if it's a word a day. i __love you guys, and hopefully i'll see you soon with the next chapter! which _is_ when the elsanna begins to gets real. _;) _something to look forward to, aye? in the meantime, i beg of you guys to please stay with me. it'd make me feel a whole lot better._

_all the best._


End file.
